A gripping tale of paranoia exacerbated by a stay-at-home order during a pandemic.
A horror novel traces what happens when two wives remain quarantined in their new apartment.
Jacqueline and Ashley have just moved to Austin, Texas. After a long day of unpacking, they decide to attend a late-summer screening of Jaws just a few minutes’ walk from their apartment. After the movie, walking hand in hand, they are assaulted by a bigot in a cardigan. For Jacqueline, already struggling with paranoia, this event is the catalyst for her escalating fear, compounded by the events that follow a few months later. On March 13, 2020, the president of the United States mandates a stay-at-home order because a deadly pandemic has reached America. Each of the following chapters opens with an epigraph that sets the tone for the increasing alarm and panic caused by the pandemic; for example, “ ‘Jailed Protestors Are Living In a COVID Hotbed and Being Starved to the Point of Hallucination and Agonizing Death’—headline from The Hill June 2020.” Some of the epigraphs sound so authentic that readers may question whether they are real quotes. Inside the two women’s apartment, Jacqueline retreats further and further into her paranoia and experiences hallucinations of the attacker from the movie night, dubbed “The Cardigan Man.” Meanwhile, Ashley tries to care for her wife and tread lightly around Jacqueline’s mental illness, which grows more and more severe in quarantine. It is only when their landlord, Doug, decides to shut all the residents inside their apartments for “public safety,” that Hamilton’s story morphs into a riveting tale of survival. Jacqueline retreats further inward and Ashley struggles to ration their food, even cooking a mouse for nourishment. Although the landlord’s motivation for locking the residents inside seems shaky at best—he shoots and kills tenants who try to escape—this novel is well paced. The suspense that comes with reading a story based on actual events is strengthened by a healthy dose of gore and a fantastical ending tied to Jacqueline’s mental state.
A gripping tale of paranoia exacerbated by a stay-at-home order during a pandemic.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-952075-03-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Nerdy Wordsmith
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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