More of a curiosity for political junkies than a satisfying story of international intrigue.
A progressive superstar pens her first political thriller.
Anyone who follows the news knows Abrams as a politician and voting rights activist. She's less well known as a novelist. Using the pseudonym Selena Montgomery, Abrams has published several works of romantic suspense. Her new novel begins when Supreme Court Justice Howard Wynn falls into a coma. His clerk Avery Keene is shocked to discover that her boss has made her his legal guardian and granted her power of attorney. The fate of one of the most powerful men in the world is in her hands—and her life is in danger. Abrams gives us nefarious doings in the world of biotech, a president with autocratic tendencies and questionable ethics, and a young woman struggling to unravel a conspiracy while staying one step ahead of the people who want her out of the way. Unfortunately, the author doesn't weave these intriguing elements into an enjoyable whole. Abrams makes some odd word choices, such as this: “The intricate knot she had twisted into her hair that morning bobbed cunningly as she neared her office.” The adverb cunningly is mystifying, and Abrams uses it in a similar way later on. There are disorienting shifts in point of view. And Abrams lavishes a great deal of attention on details that simply don’t matter, which makes the pace painfully slow. This is a fatal flaw in a suspense novel, but it may not be the most frustrating aspect of this book. For a protagonist who has gotten where she is by being smart, Avery makes some stunningly poor decisions. For example, the fact that she has a photographic memory is an important plot point and is clearly a factor in Justice Wynn’s decision to enlist her help. When she finds a piece of paper upon which is printed a long string of characters and the words "BURN UPON REVIEW," Avery memorizes the lines of numbers and letters—and then, even though she knows she’s being surveilled, she snaps a shot of the paper with her phone, thereby making the whole business of setting it on fire quite pointless.
More of a curiosity for political junkies than a satisfying story of international intrigue.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54657-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The novel offers mystery aplenty, but at its core, there is a deep and compassionate humanity.
Two old friends, relationship forged in fire and trauma, find themselves at the center of a murder mystery.
Frida Nilsen and Gabriel Miller are staying at the Ara, a comfortable desert hotel in Escalante, Utah, trying to decide whether both of them are ready to participate in a documentary about some mysterious point in their shared past. Late at night, Frida is standing on their suite’s private patio, smoking, when she overhears a fight between wealthy tabloid tycoon William Brenner and his young, glamorous wife, Sabrina. The next day, Sabrina’s body is found, her head caved in. When Frida tells the cops about the couple’s argument, William is arrested, but hours later, he returns to the Ara and seems to have both Frida and Gabriel in his sights. It turns out he recognizes Gabriel from a scandal 10 years prior, when his wife, Annie, went missing and was then discovered dead. Gabriel was never charged in her death, but papers like William’s had a field day stalking him and posting articles and photos that suggested his guilt. But unbeknownst even to William Brenner, Frida and Gabriel share a bond that’s deeper and darker than Annie’s death. They were born into a cult run by a charismatic dirtbag named Émile. Though they aren’t related by blood, this shared childhood and teenage trauma made them as close as siblings, and when they escaped, they had only each other. While Frida remains the narrator, chapters alternate back and forth between the present day and the past, offering a slow reveal from their childhood to their escape from the cult and the difficult years of adjusting to the real world. Michallon does incredible work building both characters and tension; Frida’s self-awareness and vulnerability clash with her strength and even hardness, but that’s what trauma has wrought. As Michallon poignantly writes, “This is who we are.…We start over together. Again. And again.”
The novel offers mystery aplenty, but at its core, there is a deep and compassionate humanity.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593802762
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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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