The fifth entry in the Charlie Fox thriller series, Sharp delivers solid action and a nicely conflicted main character set against the backdrop of the extravagant world of the obscenely wealthy.
Charlie Fox spent time in the British Army and underwent Special Forces training, but ended up in the Manhattan offices of a private security firm specializing in close personal protection. Her boyfriend, Sean, sustained grave injuries, chronicled in Sharp’s previous novel, Fourth Day (2011), and remains in a coma. Charlie visits him every day, hoping to spark him into waking from his three-month sleep, but doctors aren’t optimistic. In the meantime, there’s a building attraction to another man that’s worrisome. Meanwhile, Charlie has been assigned to guard a rich young woman named Dina. Dina lives in the Hamptons with her wealthy mother and spends her days riding her champion horses and attending social functions where people like the billionaire Eisenberg family throw down. Charlie’s only one of many bodyguards who shadow the spoiled and shallow progeny of the very rich; a recent spate of kidnappings has made everyone jumpy and even more security conscious than ever. The kidnappers started with one young girl and worked their ways through the younger set, finally cutting off half the finger of one young heir. Now it looks like Dina may be next and her mother is determined that she remain safe, but Charlie’s finding this one difficult. Between Dina’s stubborn refusal to remain on her guard and the bad behavior of the crowd she wants to hang around with, Charlie must try and figure out who wants to snatch her young charge and when they will try. Sharp’s fifth entry is as gritty and unapologetically dark and violent as her others, although the author tends to spout statistics that sound derived straight from a reference book. But Charlie is a likable-enough character, and while readers won’t be surprised by the turn of events, they should be interested enough to want to stay until the end. A taut, dark thriller with plenty of action.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-276-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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