A somewhat contrived but atmospheric and psychologically rich tale of erotic and philosophical enigmas.
A reporter on the trail of a missing woman finds herself embroiled in pornography and weird rituals in this labyrinthine mystery.
Andromeda Chamberlain, a freelance journalist with preternatural self-possession and a cheek scar that doesn’t spoil her looks, gets a strange assignment from an anonymous editor to write about Margot Vaughn. Margot hasn’t been heard from for a decade, since she ran away from home at the age of 15. Despite odd provisos—Andromeda has to wear a titanium collar at all times—the enormous fee seals the deal. Andromeda jets to Miami to see Margot’s father but turns up no leads. Then a homeless man gives her a DVD of an artsy porn movie starring Margot that’s full of symbolic references to ancient Greek rites. That clue sends Andromeda to Los Angeles, where she loses a tail by borrowing a porn distributor’s car in exchange for a promise to do a soft-core video. Soon, she’s off to Paris, where she discovers that scandalous avant-garde filmmaker Orlando Gidding directed Margot’s movie. Later, Andromeda attends a costume ball in Venice, where she gets chloroformed, tied up, undressed, and injected with psychedelics in front of an audience. Unfazed, she travels to a medieval Scottish abbey where Orlando is completing his film version of Faust. But before he’ll answer questions about Margot, Andromeda must find five keys he has hidden in the abbey by investigating cryptic clues. The sexual tone and mythological resonances of Brace’s yarn feel like a mashup of the John Fowles novel The Magus and Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, replete with swanky furnishings, ruminations on art, and casual nudity. Andromeda is an uneven hero, quick-witted but passive, suggestible, and led by artificial plot twists. Although given to jarring intellectual digressions (“The free-market is…a chaos of irrationality operating within a tightly bounded space: a Feyerabendian tumult within a Foucaultian constellation of power relations”), Brace is a talented writer. The author’s canny prose finds sharp, inchoate conflict (“She can feel slight pressure from the pad of his thumb under her jaw pushing upward, whether to ease access to her lips to be kissed or to her neck to be strangled she does not know”) in the most innocuous situations.
A somewhat contrived but atmospheric and psychologically rich tale of erotic and philosophical enigmas.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73731-923-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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