Workmanlike and consistently absorbing but not spectacular except for that eye-rolling epilogue.
An Alabama personal injury lawyer who seems to have modeled his professional and personal life on Better Call Saul is called on for his first criminal case.
Nobody disputes a few simple facts: That handyman Waylon Pike was carrying on an affair with his frequent employer Jana Waters; that he killed her husband, Dr. Braxton Waters; and that he confessed as much first to a casual acquaintance and then to the police. What’s under debate is whether the $15,000 Pike received for the murder came, as he told the cops, from Jana Waters, who just happened to withdraw that exact sum from her bank the day before, or from someone else. For most residents of Guntersville, this debate is purely theoretical since they’re sure that Jana hired her adulterous husband’s killer. Even Jana’s brother, billboard-loving attorney Jason Rich, finds it hard to believe that his long-estranged sister isn’t guilty. But he’s moved to defend her by the tearful pleas of her daughters, Niecy and Nola, whom he hasn’t seen for years, and by a more pressing threat by local drug king Tyson Cade, who’d taken advantage of Jana repeatedly to defer her payment of the $50,000 she owed him for his product. Cade doesn’t want Jana to testify in her own defense, and he really doesn’t want his own name to come up in the trial. So he demands that Jason not take the case, letting it go to a less-motivated appointed attorney, or if he does take the case, that he keep Jana off the stand. The obstacles would be formidable even for an experienced criminal defense attorney; a novice like Jason can only pray for a miracle. Bailey conscientiously sweats the details all the way to a dazzling but not entirely persuasive double-twist ending.
Workmanlike and consistently absorbing but not spectacular except for that eye-rolling epilogue.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3727-3
Page Count: 379
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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