Melodrama among the privileged opens the door to a dark, gripping mystery.
A suspicious death prompts a former Wall Street broker to look more closely at her wealthy Montana community in Hemphill’s debut thriller.
Katherine Hawthorne isn’t like the other wives in Livingston. She’s a power broker now in early retirement and definitely not one of “the Dolls”—the “prized possessions” of rich, white-collar men. Even so, Katherine has made friends, and she’s understandably shaken when Stacey Olsen’s house suddenly explodes, with Stacey presumably inside. It doesn’t take long to surmise the explosion was no accident, and her death is considered a likely murder. Allegations of Stacey’s multiple affairs give quite a few of the community members potential motives. That’s an angle local sheriff Dan Bentley considers, though he quickly butts heads with Nick Conti, a private investigator and old friend whom one of the Dolls calls in. Katherine stumbles onto something else entirely, turning up a much more viable suspect for Stacey’s death. Hemphill deftly establishes this “über-rich community,” zeroing in on a handful of couples entangled in all sorts of shady stuff, including copious marital affairs. Katherine herself has noticeable flaws (“she rarely looked back at the fact that she was a facilitator of the liar loans that helped create the devastation of the American economy”), but this razor-sharp protagonist makes for a capable amateur investigator and ably drives the mystery plot. Much of the goings-on are delightfully soap-operatic and sometimes humorous. There’s a bit of violence and some frankly described sex acts, some of which are unnerving. While most readers will guess who the killer is, that won’t lessen the impact of the novel’s exhilarating latter half, in which Katherine finds herself up against a genuine menace. Everything builds to an unexpected turn (or two or three) and a memorable ending.
Melodrama among the privileged opens the door to a dark, gripping mystery.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780997277715
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2023
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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