Rayne’s third psychic mystery is less atmospheric but more volatile and unpredictable than her other work, with colorful...
A school celebration is shadowed by a 200-year-old mystery. Can a noted ghostbuster unravel it?
Cresacre School may be tempting fate by building its bicentenary around an unsolved mystery: the disappearance of a group of nuns from the school, then called Cresacre Convent, centuries ago. Not coincidentally, the event is organized by alumna Arabella Tallis, who’s also the ladylove of music historian and sometime psychic investigator Phineas Fox (Chord of Evil, 2017, etc.). Diary entries from the 1790s interspersed with the present-day narrative show the piano prodigy Gina Chandos becoming the amorous target of predatory music master Cesare Chimaera. The school is now haunted by Ginevra, a ghost who’s the subject of much mystery and even more speculation. Ginevra’s also the subject of an opera written by Gustav Tulliver, whose niece Olivia was a classmate of Arabella’s and who’s now pressing the school to make the opera’s performance a centerpiece of the celebration. The school’s leaders aren’t wild about the idea even though the decidedly dotty Olivia has been a generous donor. They’d be even less enthusiastic if they knew about Olivia’s dark secret. Back when she was a student, Olivia brought her frenemy Imogen, a potential opera performer on whom Gustav had romantic designs, to rehearse with him in his basement studio and help him finish the opera. In the middle of a sudden argument, Olivia killed Imogen. As Gina’s relationship with Chimaera advances, Phin takes the measure of the strong-willed Olivia and proceeds accordingly.
Rayne’s third psychic mystery is less atmospheric but more volatile and unpredictable than her other work, with colorful characters and an inexorable threat of violence under the surface.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8814-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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