Maher (Deadline, 2013) keeps the pot boiling by forgoing character development, moral complexity, and plot twists in order...
A Nova Scotia waterman risks his life to salvage an abandoned vessel, then finds that no good deed goes unpunished.
Phillip Scarnum ekes out a marginal living delivering other people’s boats. In the middle of taking the schooner Cerberus to its owner, Halifax dentist Dr. Greely, he comes on the Kelly Lynn, a lobster boat stuck on a reef off Cape Sambro. Though it’s blowing a gale and he’s alone aboard the Cerberus, he succeeds in extricating the Kelly Lynn from the Sambro Ridge and tows her into the Chester boatyard his old friend Charlie Isenor owns, then buys and drinks a quart of Crown Royal in what turn out to be his last quiet hours. The lobster boat’s owner, it turns out, is Bobby Falkenham, the high-rolling businessman whose acquisitions include Scarnum’s ex-lover Karen. And although he’s willing to pay top dollar as a salvage fee, and pay it fast, the deal founders when the body of fisherman James Zinck washes ashore, shot in the back. Jimmy had taken the Kelly Lynn out on her last voyage; he’d specifically asked Doug Amos, his usual fishing partner, to stay behind; and there’s every indication that he’d been using the boat to run drugs. Although the local Mounties arrest Scarnum for cocaine possession and murder, he faces even bigger problems: the appearance of Jimmy’s wife, Angela Rodenhiser, who isn’t sure whether the baby she’s carrying is Jimmy’s, Falkenham’s, or Scarnum’s, and a pair of Mexican enforcers convinced that Scarnum’s salvage operation included the cocaine the Kelly Lynn was carrying and determined to get back it from him one way or another.
Maher (Deadline, 2013) keeps the pot boiling by forgoing character development, moral complexity, and plot twists in order to churn out one fast-paced action scene after another. It’s all one-dimensional but highly effective if you’re in the mood.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4597-3451-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dundurn
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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