A thriller that doesn’t elevate its fascinating core premise.
Across two timelines, a band of friends explores the secrets of an Arkansas hot springs town.
In a town in the Ozarks, there are eight magic houses, each with its own abilities. One house forces visitors to tell the truth, another can slow down time for those inside it, and a third grants powerful luck. The friends spend their senior year of high school hunting for the houses; the eighth and most mysterious they call the Portal House, and they believe it can transport them to the alternate dimension that gives the houses their powers. But their quest ends in tragedy, and most of the group leaves town, presumably for good. Fifteen years later, in 2015, they’re drawn back when one of them—Brandi—disappears. While the rest of the friends found success elsewhere, Brandi stayed in Arkansas, cleaning houses and struggling with an addiction to prescription pills. The book focuses on Jay, a painter constricted by guilt over leaving Brandi, her one-time best friend, behind. There’s also Iggy, a popular quarterback who was once Jay’s lover; Charlie, bookish and wistful; and Max and Hilma, wealthy twins who are outsiders to the town. Finding Brandi is mandatory: The group is bound by an oath they took, given power by one of the houses. The influences of Stephen King, Donna Tartt, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are clear here. Aside from the fantastical houses, which are neither haunted nor quite benevolent, the world of the novel is conventional, and Jay is the only character with depth. At the end, the person who turns out to be the antagonist discusses their actions and motives and then asks: “Is this like at the end of some cheesy movie, where the villain just explains everything to you?” Jay isn’t sure if it’s just a joke, and neither is the reader.
A thriller that doesn’t elevate its fascinating core premise.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780374601775
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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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