Vigorous but routine, with a particularly thin set of bogeymen behind the felonies. And isn’t it about time hard-bitten...
Apparently, underemployed Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl’s first seven cases (A Killer’s Kiss, 2007, etc.) have left him sufficiently starry-eyed to be capable of rude disillusionment when he runs into a bruising congressional campaign, and vice versa.
Congressman Peter DeMathis’ usual bagman, Colin Frost, has been picked up with too much heroin for his own personal use. Although Victor’s old classmate Melanie Brooks gets Victor to take the case, and the judge is persuaded to throw out the crucial evidence by a broad hint of blackmail, Frost’s gotten enough unwanted publicity to make him anathema to DeMathis. So Melanie invites Victor to take his place and deliver a $50,000 extortion payment to inoffensive Jessica Barnes. The fallout is immediate. Very soon after their meeting, Jessica is battered to death, and the police pluck Victor from the Governor’s Ball and send him shrieking into the headlines as well. On the other hand, there’s an upside: When Victor enters his office the next day, it’s full of potential clients who assume he has a long history as a bagman and want to hire him as their own personal fixer. Seeing no reason why he shouldn’t enjoy the silver lining along with the cloud, Victor allows veteran fixer Stony Mulroney, in the tale’s most amusing episode, to initiate him into the Fellowship of the Bag, a select circle of well-connected specialists who fix each other’s problems for an undisclosed markup. But there’s no way his job for the congressman or his fling with Ossana DeMathis, the congressman’s sister, are going to come to happy ends.
Vigorous but routine, with a particularly thin set of bogeymen behind the felonies. And isn’t it about time hard-bitten Victor, who improbably turns crusader toward the end of this installment, lost his last illusions about politics, ethics and the Philadelphia bar?Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-477-82283-8
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
