While Max’s original bitchy attitude needed adjusting, this incarnation makes for some embarrassingly maudlin moments.
Brennan gives Maxine "Max" Revere a makeover, though she's still a rich, beautiful and brilliant TV host and true-crime crusader.
In the first novel of the series (Notorious, 2014), Max was a know-it-all with no friends, a monstrous ego and the conviction that she was right all the time. Brennan has taken her unlikable protagonist and turned her into a squishy, lovable curmudgeon who's adored by everyone except criminals. This time Max is on the trail of Adam Bachman, caught nine months earlier with a girl in the trunk of his car and now on trial for five murders; she's wangled an interview with him for her television show, Maximum Exposure. Max is prone to taking on dangerous assignments, going undercover to bust criminals and expose corruption. That behavior has earned her a bodyguard, David, who is now also her best friend. Max has also been looking into a couple named Palazzolo who disappeared on a trip to New York; she’s positive that they’re linked to Bachman. After calling in a favor from missing persons detective Sally O’Hara, Max insists that someone else was involved in the Bachman case and—torn between two handsome cops who both adore her—tries to balance her life while working tirelessly, but always on her terms, for good. The first half of the book moves along nicely, though Max’s sudden transformation from obnoxious to gracious is disconcerting; but the second half, while it starts with a bang, drags on and on, with one aha moment stacked upon another until exhausted readers will find themselves wishing the whole thing would just stop. Max has a few too many close calls to be believable, and the relentless introspection slows the action, which naturally includes cops shooting out the tires of a fleeing vehicle, Brennan’s stock police response to crooks in cars.
While Max’s original bitchy attitude needed adjusting, this incarnation makes for some embarrassingly maudlin moments.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-03502-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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