“This isn’t how it was supposed to happen,” think Jahn’s luckless characters over and over again. Wrong. For fans of...
Seven years after his daughter vanishes from her bedroom, and two months after he’s finally agreed to a funeral for her, a Texas police dispatcher gets a phone call that turns his world upside down.
Unlike his ex-wife Debbie, Ian Hunt never gave up hope that their daughter, who was only seven when someone sliced the screen in her bedroom window and carried her off, might still be alive. So when a frantic young woman calling herself “Sarah…No, my name is Maggie, Maggie Hunt” phones 911 and says that she’s just escaped from the man who’s been holding her prisoner, Ian is ready to leap into action. Unfortunately, Henry Dean spots her and snatches her again before she can identify him to her father. But a trick of fate is about to lead Chief Todd Davis, of the Bulls Mouth Police Department, and Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Deputy Bill Finch, who just happens to be Debbie’s second husband, straight to Dean’s door. Not even the bloody showdown that follows can slow down Ian once he’s scented his quarry and confirmed that the precious daughter he left in her brother’s care while he and Debbie went on a married-folks’ date is alive and looking for him. A scene as harrowing as anything in Good Neighbors (2011) offers graphic proof that he’ll stop at absolutely nothing to track her down. Bullets and pages fly furiously as Ian pursues Dean, his fragile wife Beatrice and Maggie across the Southwest to Kaiser, Calif., where a final confrontation with Dean and his equally well-armed brother Ron awaits.
“This isn’t how it was supposed to happen,” think Jahn’s luckless characters over and over again. Wrong. For fans of action-packed suspense, this is exactly how it’s supposed to happen.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-14-312070-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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