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ONE BY ONE

Cain plots furiously enough for three installments and adds a remarkably florid climax and a series of downbeat epilogues...

Philadelphia journalist Danny Ryan (The 8th Circle, 2016), reluctantly agreeing to help an old friend who was never even much of a friend, lives to regret it, which is more than you can say for the friend.

Back at Furness High, Greg Moss, quarterback of the football team, ran with an in-crowd Danny could only watch from afar and supply intermittently with weed. In the 25 years since, that crowd has thinned dramatically, along with some of its hangers-on. Three of Greg’s teammates on the Furness Eagles are dead. Jenna Jeffords, an ugly duckling who aspired to write romance novels, died in a house fire, and Ollie Deacon, her prom date, was shot to death. Now Greg’s been getting threatening text messages with a biblical cast, and he wants Danny, who’s left the Philadelphia Sentinel and gone freelance, to see what’s up. What’s up, Danny swiftly finds, is the murder of Greg himself hours after their meeting, apparently the first new casualty of a killer who just can’t quit. The logical place for a muckraker like Danny to look is Greg’s real-estate work with Cromoca Partners, a shadowy development firm that’s maybe too well-connected in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But Danny, still aching over all the personal losses he’s already suffered himself, can’t help thinking that the secret to Greg’s death lies in the wild parties he used to host back in high school—and one party in particular. Unless, of course, the multilayered mystery has ties to both Greg’s current dubious partners and his equally unsavory past….

Cain plots furiously enough for three installments and adds a remarkably florid climax and a series of downbeat epilogues for good measure. The payoff is some quality time with a hero whose “brain wasn’t working because his heart was broken beyond repair.”

Pub Date: March 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-68331-087-7

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crooked Lane

Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017

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THE SILENT PATIENT

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

Awards & Accolades

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  • New York Times Bestseller


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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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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