Frey toys with a satisfyingly downbeat wrap-up based on fate and character à la James M. Cain, but then, alas, opts for a...
Once underway, a gripping thriller about online investing and trading, by a master of financial skullduggery (Trust Fund, 2000, etc.).
Augustus McKnight has no future as an assistant sales rep for retail paper products. When his boss finds him using his computer for personal day trading and demands a cut of Augustus’s big win on a stock lottery, he quits his job and heads for a rented desk at Bedford and Associates, a day-trading firm near the Capitol. Meanwhile, his wife Melanie, disgruntled by his unlikely prospects as a sales rep, asks for a divorce. But before he can tell her that he’s made a killing, she’s found murdered in a D.C. alley. Augustus stands to come into a million bucks, since only a few months earlier she had him sign mutual life insurance policies. But the policies’ slayer statute says that if the beneficiary has contributed to the death, he can’t collect. From Augustus’s cubicle at Bedford the reader learns the real deal about day trading and the great likelihood that Augustus will eventually lose everything, including the million, when and if the insurance company pays off. We meet his fellow coworkers in nearby cubicles who also stand to crash and burn as they make thousands of transactions, buying and selling on the big gamble. Bedford and Associates alone will be the real winners through its cut on each transaction. Then a D.C. cop, a big black 30-year man, begins looking into Augustus’s background and checking up on the late Melanie, who unbeknownst to her husband earned big bucks as an exotic dancer at an after-hours club three nights weekly while Augustus thought she was working late.
Frey toys with a satisfyingly downbeat wrap-up based on fate and character à la James M. Cain, but then, alas, opts for a melodramatic unraveling. Someday yet he’ll take the plunge.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44324-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.
A savage debut thriller that renders the Electra complex electric, the mother/daughter bond a psychopathic stranglehold.
Camille Preaker is a cutter. At 13, she carved “queasy” above her navel, at 29, “vanish” on her neck. In the intervening years, she etched her entire epidermis from the chin down with cries for help. Entertainment Weekly TV critic Flynn discloses this information 60 pages into her explosive novel; before that, we know Camille as a hard-drinking, good-looking Jimmy Breslin wannabe, sent by a second-tier paper to cover two gruesome killings in her Missouri hometown. Nine-year-old Natalie’s corpse was found jammed between the Cut-n-Curl Beauty Parlor and Bifty’s Hardware nine months after another’s girl’s body was dumped in a creek. The murderer’s grisly signature? Both strangled corpses had their teeth yanked out. As she snoops around, Camille gets hot for a cute detective and anxious in her mother’s house. Haunted by the ghost of her sister, a child felled by mysterious illness, Camille warily befriends half-sister Amma, a snaky Lolita with precociously developed smarts and breasts. Bite-sized Queen of Mean who rules the town’s teens, Amma joins Camille in shuddering at their mother, Aurora, an oh-so-proper virago who pulls down a million dollars a year running a pig slaughterhouse. Mommie Dearest is afflicted with an outré psychological disturbance: She inflicts illness on her loved ones to then prove her sweetness by nursing them. Could she be the slayer? Or perhaps an even more hideous revelation awaits? Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women’s lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over.
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-34154-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Though the novel eventually begins to sag under the weight of all its plot elements, fans of the psychological thriller will...
A pathological liar, a woman in a coma, a childhood diary, an imaginary friend, an evil sister—this is an unreliable-narrator novel with all the options.
"A lot of people would think I have a dream job, but nightmares are dreams too." Was it only a week ago Amber Reynolds thought her job as an assistant radio presenter was a nightmare? Now it's Dec. 26 (or Boxing Day, because we're in England), and she's lying in a hospital bed seemingly in a coma, fully conscious but unable to speak or move. We won't learn what caused her condition until the end of the book, and the journey to that revelation will be complicated by many factors. One: She doesn't remember her accident. Two: As she confesses immediately, "Sometimes I lie." Three: It's a story so complicated that even after the truth is exposed, it will take a while to get it straight in your head. As Amber lies in bed recalling the events of the week that led to her accident, several other narrative threads kick up in parallel. In the present, she's visited in her hospital room by her husband, a novelist whose affections she has come to doubt. Also her sister, with whom she shares a dark secret, and a nasty ex-boyfriend whom she ran into in the street the week before. He works as a night porter at the hospital, giving him unfortunate access to her paralyzed but not insensate body. Interwoven with these sections are portions of a diary, recounting unhappy events that happened 25 years earlier from a 9-year-old child's point of view. Feeney has loaded her maiden effort with possibilities for twists and reveals—possibly more than strictly necessary—and they hit like a hailstorm in the last third of the book. Blackmail, forgery, secret video cameras, rape, poisoning, arson, and failing to put on a seat belt all play a role.
Though the novel eventually begins to sag under the weight of all its plot elements, fans of the psychological thriller will enjoy this ambitious debut.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-14484-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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