Fans will love the endlessly knotty complications; those unable to commit their full attention to the problem at hand may...
The smothering of a supremely unlikable woman provokes a conspiracy, a false confession, a hysterical outburst and round upon round of sifting through the evidence by DC Simon Waterhouse and his wife, DS Charlie Zailer (Kind of Cruel, 2013, etc.).
Francine Breary was no prize even before the stroke that left her unable to move or speak. She’d taken accountant Tim Breary away from Gaby Struthers, the brilliant, wealthy tech developer he loved, and persuaded him to marry her, then proceeded to make his life miserable. So it’s no wonder Tim has confessed to her murder, adding parenthetically that he doesn’t know why he did it. Every detail of his confession is backed up by the other residents of The Dower House—former caregiver Kerry Jose; her husband, Daniel; Francine’s caregiver, Lauren Cookson; and Lauren’s brutal husband, Jason. But Gaby, stranded overnight in Düsseldorf with an obnoxious stranger who turns out to be Lauren, hears her unwanted companion insist that Tim is being sent to his death for a murder he didn't commit—then sees her escape into the night before Gaby can question her further. Lauren's outburst throws new light on the man Charlie, watching from the sidelines, has dubbed the Don’t Know Why Killer but raises a host of uncomfortable new questions which are meat and drink to Hannah (The Orphan Choir, 2014, etc.). Before the curtain finally comes down, Simon will have heard unwelcome revelations from his boss’ daughter, questioned Gaby about who assaulted her moments after she walked out on her live-in lover, and contemplated a second body cooling in the morgue. Hannah bores down deep into her tiny cast’s secret lives, then still deeper, pausing along the way to cite or reprint a dozen poems, some of them clues, some not.
Fans will love the endlessly knotty complications; those unable to commit their full attention to the problem at hand may well quit in exhaustion before the denouement.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-670-78586-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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