Mariani likes to separate his heroes so that he can cut back and forth between them as they’re getting simultaneously...
Mariani’s debut is a globetrotting action fantasy with one eye fixed firmly on The Da Vinci Code and the other on Hollywood.
Does any of this sound familiar? Centuries ago, a beloved artist got in bad with a powerful fraternal organization because one of his best-known productions contained codes that revealed its most closely guarded secrets. The artist died, but the organization lives on as an international conspiracy that’s still working criminal mischief all over the map of present-day Europe. This time around, the artist is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the tell-all production is The Magic Flute, and the conspirators are the Order of Ra, a rogue Masonic faction whose hobby is ritual murder. Instead of sweating the details of the artist’s life or work or the specific content or meaning of the codes that so threatened the Masons, or even convincingly linking conspiracies past and present, Mariani falls back on that old chestnut, the British agent reunited with the girl he left behind. The spy is Benedict Hope, whose SAS assignment is to rescue kidnap victims. The lady is opera star Leigh Llewellyn, whose brother Oliver was executed last year after he stumbled across the Order of Ra's latest handiwork. Leigh has spent 15 years getting over Ben, but he’s still the person she calls when she barely escapes a kidnap attempt herself. Sure enough, her troubles stem from the book Olly had been writing about Mozart’s death. The search for clues, coupled with a chase after bad guys, sometimes away from them, takes Ben and Leigh—and soon enough, their ally, Viennese cop Markus Kinski—across the Continent in brief chapters headed by place names you just know will appear as subtitles in the movie version too.
Mariani likes to separate his heroes so that he can cut back and forth between them as they’re getting simultaneously ambushed in equally picturesque locales. Nor is he averse to a high body count. Apart from the rumor that he was poisoned, though, don’t expect to learn much about Mozart.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9336-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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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