Along with the steadily mounting tension, Anscombe (Shank, 1996, etc.) provides enough exquisitely turned therapeutic...
A forensic psychiatrist asked to evaluate an accused stalker finds himself pulled into a nightmare in which nothing is what it seems—maybe not even himself.
Most people who violate restraining orders face serious trouble. But Craig Cavanaugh is a Harvard undergraduate whose financier/philanthropist grandfather is so wealthy and powerful that his prince faces nothing more menacing than Paul Lucas of the Sanders Institute. Egged into taking the case by a boss who hints that his latest grant application might hang in the balance, Paul is soon screaming for the exit. A dicey interview with his patient ends badly when he overreacts to Craig’s cool needling about his wife Abby and their infant son Adrian, killed in a car crash, and Sanders security responds with condign force. Then Paul’s imprudent meeting with Natalie Davis, the Harvard teaching assistant who’s complained that Craig just won’t accept a polite brush-off, deepens his danger when it’s witnessed by Craig, who’s convinced his shrink is moving in on his girl. Paul’s struggles to get off the hook only get him more deeply embroiled with Craig, and on the young man’s release from Sanders, Paul’s committed to seeing him every week, legally responsible for his behavior but powerless to control it. All the while he’s dropping hints about having broken into Paul’s house and acquainted himself with his most intimate secrets, Craig is plotting more serious revenge. And once his devious plan becomes clear, even to benighted Paul, the therapist’s only hope is to act like a sociopath himself. The finale, which places the four armed leading characters in a dark basement demanding each other’s trust, is hair-raising.
Along with the steadily mounting tension, Anscombe (Shank, 1996, etc.) provides enough exquisitely turned therapeutic dialogues between participants ferally skilled in talking around the point to create a heaven for connoisseurs of mind games.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32399-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
Lacking in both thrills and chills.
Another homage to classic horror from a bestselling author.
Sager’s debut novel, Final Girls (2017), wasn’t so much a horror novel as a commentary about horror movies in novel form. It was clever but also very well-crafted. The author tried to do something similar with The Last Time I Lied (2018), with significantly less satisfying results. This new novel is another attempt to make the model work. Whether or not it does depends on how invested one is in formula for the sake of formula. Jules Larsen is getting over a breakup and the loss of her job when she finds a gig that seems too good to be true: The Bartholomew, a storied Manhattan building, wants to pay her thousands of dollars to simply occupy a vacant—and luxurious—apartment. Jules soon gets the feeling that all is not as it seems at the Bartholomew, which is, of course, a perfect setup for some psychological suspense, but the problem is that there is little in the way of narrative tension because Jules’ situation is so obviously not right from the very beginning. While interviewing for the job, she's asked about her health history. She's informed that she is not allowed to have guests in the apartment. She's warned that she must not interact with or talk to anyone else about the building’s wealthy and famous inhabitants. And she learns that she will be paid under the table. While this might not be enough to deter someone who is broke and desperate, it does mean that Jules should be a bit more concerned than she is when the really scary stuff starts happening. It’s possible to read this as a parody of the absurdly intrepid horror heroine, but, even as that, it’s not a particularly entertaining parody. Jules’ best friend makes a reference to American Horror Story, which feels less like a postmodern nod than a reminder that there are other, better examples of the genre that one could be enjoying instead.
Lacking in both thrills and chills.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4514-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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