A largely lackluster addition to the haunted house genre.
A man’s new home might be the epicenter for a powerful evil in this first installment of Cooper’s horror series.
Kevin Swan comes into possession of a 97-year-old house in the remote wilds of California (somewhere outside Pasadena), where the closest town is a small mountainside village. With only his German Shepherd, Princess (“a strapping, adult male, rescue dog; the unfortunate moniker had come with him”), for company, he soon begins to notice strange happenings in his new home. Tired of bickering with his dog like they’re an old married couple, on a whim Kevin picks up two homeless men from a parking lot to help him around the manor in exchange for room and board. The motley crew quickly realizes that supernatural occurrences are happening with increasing frequency; books about dark magic randomly appear, and they find a chalkboard with weird runes written on it. Kevin attempts to get help from a Caltech professor with an interest in the occult, but neither he nor “Spooky,” another casual dabbler in the dark arts, can provide many answers. Kevin resolves to figure out the mystery of this haunted house or die trying as he encounters more dark forces at play. Cooper tells a strange tale that adequately unsettles but often loses itself in long-winded tangents that are a slog to follow and sometimes even confusing to the reader. Sudden switches to different perspectives, such as that of a knife or a Chinese woman called “Shenzhen Lady,” occur with no explanation for their purpose within the narrative. The writing is disjointed and overly descriptive, lingering on unimportant moments of housework or inner musings in favor of furthering the plot. The characters are either barely present or one-dimensional, with Kevin the only one given a detailed backstory. The ending is a head-scratching cliffhanger that leaves room for a sequel that will hopefully have more answers than questions.
A largely lackluster addition to the haunted house genre.Pub Date: May 11, 2022
ISBN: 9798810054955
Page Count: 495
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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