A wonderfully suspenseful and engrossing thriller.
In this debut mystery, a man tries to find the killer of a socialite, but his search may take him down darker paths than he could ever have imagined.
In Jones’ story, which opens in 1924, New Yorker Jarek Videni has come to Minnesota to investigate the vicious murder of socialite Sarah O’Connell. She was found stabbed to death in her home library in St. Paul with her heart ripped out. The police have no suspects, and her heart is still missing. Jarek, “an intuitive,” journeyed to the Midwest of “his own accord. However, the travel was significantly prodded” by the anonymous “letters he received requesting help.” Sarah left behind her husband, Martin, an amiable and cheerful man who appears normal but has recently been sleepwalking and acting strangely. Also grieving for Sarah is her college-age daughter, Annie, who has responded by becoming reclusive, delving into as many books as she can find and becoming angry at her father. Finally, there is Rose Smith, the governess who oversees the housekeeping and cooking and has been with the family so long she is practically a member. All three have deep, dark secrets that Jarek slowly begins to uncover. But doing so puts him in danger of a horrible darkness that could overtake them all. Jarek discovers that while Sarah was a woman of great standing in the city, she was involved with the local spiritualist community. There is more at play in this great house than earthly schemes. Jones interweaves intense thrills with the supernatural to create a superb mystery that is surprising as well as rewarding. Jarek is a remarkable sleuth with a calm and kind disposition whose knowledge helps drive the plot as he faces realistic limitations. Martin, Annie, and Rose have believable personal dynamics and conflicts that support the mystery elements. Annie has an apparent animosity toward her father but still cares for him and shows concern for his weird behavior. Rose is protective of the family that gave her a chance and welcomed her, but she knows more about the O’Connells than she lets on. The twists and turns of the plot as well as unexpected character revelations make for a carefully constructed thriller that is a gripping addition to the horror genre.
A wonderfully suspenseful and engrossing thriller. (Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Paranormal)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986344003
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Water Sign Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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