For the most part, Jane’s many fans, who’ve missed her ever since Blood Money (2000), will be glad to see her at any price.
After nine years of being AWOL, Jane Whitefield McKinnon, the world’s foremost specialist in hiding fugitives from their pursuers, is back with a vengeance.
Christine Monahan, 20 and pregnant, staggers into Buffalo General Hospital asking if anyone can direct her to Jane Whitefield. Her search would be easier if she knew that Dr. Carey McKinnon’s wife, the committee chair who’s just capped a successful fundraising effort, was the woman she was looking for. As it is, Christine doesn’t meet Jane until after the hospital has been bombed in an attempt to flush her out into the open. It’s only the first of many strategies employed by the six hired guns sociopathic San Diego developer Richard Beale has sent after the ex-employee who was also his ex-lover. Keeping six people on salary 24/7 runs into serious money, but Richard has compelling motives for hunting down Christine. It isn’t enough that she broke off the affair because he’d been so abusive, or that she’s learned some unsavory secrets about the family business Richard runs for his impossibly demanding parents, who consider him “a bully, a sneak, a loafer, a coward.” In addition, the baby she’s carrying has become his sole hope of keeping any claim to the family fortune. So Richard needs Christine and her unborn child back quickly and alive. Putting five years of domestic peace behind her, Jane snaps smartly to attention—“I have to leave tonight,” she tells her long-suffering husband—keeping Christine half a step ahead of her pursuers until she can get her settled in Minneapolis under a new identity. But since Jane’s clients never enjoy true peace, only breath-catching intervals before the next round of action, it’s never in doubt that sooner or later Richard’s crew will come calling in the Twin Cities, kicking off the last, and most generic, phase of this high-potency thriller.
For the most part, Jane’s many fans, who’ve missed her ever since Blood Money (2000), will be glad to see her at any price.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101528-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
IN THE NEWS
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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