Not quite Hitchcock, but a tautly claustrophobic spiral of a story delivered with self-belief.
Is Alice deranged or has her husband swapped her newborn child for another baby?
Every character in British novelist Hannah’s slightly unhinged psychodrama shows signs of mental disorder, from desperate Alice, convinced a different baby has been substituted for her two-week-old daughter Florence; to her menacing husband David; his bossy control freak of a mother Vivienne; the smitten but introvert cop Simon, who has been put on the case; and Simon’s female boss Charlie, who is not yet over Simon’s sexual rejection of her at a party a year earlier. There are echoes of Gaslight in David’s increasingly sadistic humiliations of fragile Alice, intensifying her sense of isolation and despair; and hints of Rebecca in the scenario of an alienated victim/wife trapped in a vast house—The Elms, Vivienne’s sizeable home, where they all live—and out of her depth. When Alice and the baby disappear, Charlie is forced to take Simon’s hunches more seriously and the murder of Laura Cryer, David’s first wife, is reopened. Slowly the plot winds to a conclusion in which two possibly mad, utterly driven women struggle for the upper hand.
Not quite Hitchcock, but a tautly claustrophobic spiral of a story delivered with self-belief.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56947-468-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bohjalian manages to keep us guessing and turning pages until the very end.
In Bohjalian’s (The Flight Attendant, 2018, etc.) breathless thriller, the death of an American bicyclist in Vietnam sets off a race to avert further catastrophe.
Alexis, a doctor at an unnamed university hospital in Manhattan, met Austin six months ago when he came into her ER with a bullet in his arm, fired by a junkie in a bar where Austin and a chance acquaintance, Douglas, were playing darts. Austin works as a fundraiser at the same hospital. In fact, his office, significantly as we will learn, is near a rodent research lab. The present action takes place over a countdown clock of 10 days, beginning in Vietnam, where the new couple is on a bike tour. Austin goes for a solo ride, telling Alexis he wants to pay respects by visiting the locations where his uncle was killed and his father wounded during the war. When he doesn’t return, Alexis goes out looking for him, finding a few packets of energy gel that we already know Austin dropped on the road while being abducted—by Douglas. Pressing Austin for information, Douglas drives a dart into Austin’s hand. Vietnamese police discover Austin’s body and a post-mortem concludes that he was killed in a hit-and-run collision. While identifying the body, though, Alexis notices the wound on Austin’s hand and suspects foul play. Back in New York, she hires Ken, a PI, to investigate. Quang, a Vietnamese police captain, suspects that Austin was a smuggler, but of what? Alexis soon learns that Austin had lied about many things, not least his true mission in Vietnam. What characters learn, and when, is critical. Abetted by shifting points of view, seemingly disparate elements eventually converge to create a burgeoning sense of dread. Italicized, anonymous first-person comments, interspersed throughout, cite the long history of rats as quickly evolving plague carriers—most recently, of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Among many tantalizing questions: Austin’s former boss Sally is Douglas’ lover—where do her loyalties lie? In fact, whose side is Douglas on? And what is in those packets?
Bohjalian manages to keep us guessing and turning pages until the very end.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54480-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Even readers who don’t care for the endless bureaucratic infighting will have to admire this tour de force, in which...
The abduction of one of their own rouses the members of MI5’s dead-end Slough House (Dead Lions, 2013, etc.) to action once more.
As she’s the first to tell everyone, recovering alcoholic Catherine Standish has never been “a joe,” a field agent. She’s just the assistant to Jackson Lamb, who lords it over Slough House as if it weren’t the penultimate stop on the path from success in the Security Service to disgrace and oblivion. But that doesn’t stop her ex-lover Sean Donovan from scooping her up in a van, locking her in a room an hour outside London, and demanding in exchange for her return a copy of a most sensitive intelligence file. Naturally, River Cartwright, the colleague Catherine designates as the one she’d be most likely to trust with her life, makes a hash of his attempt to meet the ransom demand and ends up in a little room of his own being worked over by Nick Duffy of the Dogs, the service’s internal police. That’s no slur against him, though, because the savviest agent in the world (something River’s never come close to being on his best day) would never have suspected the truth about the rabbit hole Catherine’s tumbled down. Her kidnapping, it’s gradually revealed, is both more and less than it seems—less, because her abductors couldn’t be more considerate, except for the one who quickly gets killed; more, because the service itself is so torn between narcissistic careerists and warring factions battling for control that its fate, and presumably that of her majesty’s government, seems to hang in the balance.
Even readers who don’t care for the endless bureaucratic infighting will have to admire this tour de force, in which virtually every single player—good guys, bad guys, all the turncoats and in-betweeners—is somehow connected to British Intelligence.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61695-612-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
PROFILES
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