Skip Chapter 42 and this is a powerhouse of a labyrinthine read. You may be fearful of sleeping again.
This translation of a bestselling German novel is a 352-page nightmare in which dreams and reality are indiscernible to the end.
Chapter 41 of Fitzek’s thriller is an exact duplicate of the book's prologue, giving the book a feeling of reality—we're told something is going to happen, and then, when the time comes, it happens. That would normally give the reader a feeling of closure, but in this case it's unsettling, as all along we have been masterfully led to believe that the horror, the psychological damage that's been done to Leon Nader and his wife, Natalie, have been night terrors, sleep paralysis, sleepwalking nightmares on a never-ending loop. So maybe not. As a child Leon lost his birth parents in an automobile accident. He was kicked out of a foster home when he was found standing over another child's bed with a knife in his hand—while sleepwalking. Eventually, psychiatric counseling put Leon's nightmares to bed. As an adult, an architect, and husband, Leon begins experiencing night terrors again and one day wakes to see his wife packing her bags, bloody and limping away. The ensuing action is a nonstop psychological chase scene in which Leon straps a motion-activated camera to his head in hopes of figuring out what happens when he sleeps and of finding his wife safe and sound. Fitzek creates a nightmarish page-turner. The apartment building where Leon and his wife live is a labyrinth of gothic fun-house doors and mirrors where Leon can enter other apartments and realities by following the maze. And then the author missteps: Chapter 42, the one right after the duplicated chapter, which takes place "some months later," is supposed to tie the dream world, or the “third stage” between sleep and waking sensibility, back to reality. The premise of this resolution is so out of character with the entire novel to this point, so other than the raw progression of the dreams, that it seriously damages the continuity of the novel. Leon's final words only leave us unnervingly in doubt of the outcome.
Skip Chapter 42 and this is a powerhouse of a labyrinthine read. You may be fearful of sleeping again.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-327-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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