Prebble creates, and just as quickly deflates, suspenseful moments, and the plot twists are so clearly telegraphed that few...
Light on suspense and heavy on creepy-crawlies, this debut finds a man desperate to cover up his crime and protect his brother when he might be the one who needs protecting.
Growing up in 1950s London, Jonathan Maguire knew that his brother, Roger, older by six years, was different. Though Roger’s condition is never named, it’s intimated that he may be on the autism spectrum. As an adolescent, Roger developed an interest in bugs that grew into an obsession when his parents allowed him to build the titular insect farm in the family’s garden shed. The insect farm provides companionship for Roger when his brother is in school and, later, when Jonathan meets the love of his life, flautist Harriet Chalfont. When he and Harriet depart for university in Newcastle, Jonathan assumes that he’ll eventually inherit Roger-care duties from his parents, but that day comes sooner than expected after a tragedy. Now Roger’s sole caregiver, Jonathan—who marries Harriet in a quickie civil ceremony before she returns to school—struggles to adjust to his new life. Roger lives in his own world, populated by an increasingly complex array of insects, as Jonathan tries to maintain a long-distance marriage. When the unthinkable happens soon after, Jonathan must cover his tracks and also ensure that Roger knows nothing of the terrible crime Jonathan committed (or did he?). But Jonathan soon realizes that he may have underestimated his brother all these years.
Prebble creates, and just as quickly deflates, suspenseful moments, and the plot twists are so clearly telegraphed that few readers will be surprised by the outcome.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33736-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.
A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.
In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4715-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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