A uniquely dark and chilling ride.
In Sanders Brooks’ thriller, a mysterious murder sparks the revival of the death portraiture industry in LA.
Poor Karen Elmes is already dead when readers meet Viv Klein, a down-on-her-luck photographer who is skewered on social media for snapping the deceased woman’s photograph after stumbling upon her body in a forlorn back alley. Abby Katz is an intrepid reporter dispatched by the LA Times to profile the hard-pressed young photographer. Just what makes her tick? And why did she do what she did? Though conflicted about her actions in the back alley, Viv nevertheless decides that a weird job offer to photograph a wealthy man’s recently deceased mother is just too lucrative to pass up. After all, she’s told, death masks go back to King Tut’s time and even became a proto-social media phenomenon in the 19th century when good folks felt that using the novel invention of photography was a great way to preserve their dearly departed loved ones at the moment of death. (“The Victorians got all creepy about it when photography became more affordable, and they would take death portraits of their children staged with their families. Disturbing, I know.”) The creep factor is, indeed, off the charts (the proceedings are chilling long before additional bodies start hitting the floor), but Sanders Brooks’ steady and clear-eyed approach to the ghastly photo shoots makes them seem entirely plausible. The author keeps her energetic narrative tightly focused on the lead characters, along with a few other supporting players, in a continuously revolving POV storytelling arc that manages to evoke both intimacy and urgency throughout. As the dark but familiar world Viv and Abby inhabit grows increasingly perilous, the danger feels uncomfortably palpable. Brooks explores heavy questions about the morality of social media with a light, mordant touch. Narrative shifts to a detached Discord chat between true-crime enthusiasts trying to puzzle out what’s going on and news accounts about the diabolical deeds allow readers to zoom out and get their bearings before being plunged back down the claustrophobic LA streets where Viv plies her stock in trade.
A uniquely dark and chilling ride.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798218589639
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2025
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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