Fans of crime dramas will find Clary’s suspenseful yarn a welcome addition to the genre and hope for more to come.
A rousing legal thriller about abduction, murder, and a dedicated lawyer struggling to come to terms with her complex personal and professional lives.
Houston trial attorney Clary’s debut novel opens with the kidnapping of a naïve, rural Texas teenage girl, the seventh victim of a serial killer. Diligent, successful veteran attorney Michelle “Mickey” Grant is tense about the news. Her career is on the fast track, but her personal life has seen better days. As a consequence of her aggressive career ambitions, Mickey’s marriage disintegrated more than a year ago, and her ex-husband, Tyler Grant, was granted primary custody of their now-teenage daughter, Reagan. Her daughter fits the kidnapping victims’ type, so Mickey has become increasingly vigilant about Reagan’s whereabouts as the Christmas holiday draws close. Mickey excitedly anticipates spending a week with her, but then Reagan goes missing. Convicted felon and drug abuser Willie Lee Flynn is charged with the kidnappings right before the bloodied body of one of his alleged victims is found. Increasingly desperate for answers, Mickey attends the court trial; the cunning, tight-lipped Flynn is convicted on circumstantial evidence. Mickey remains unsatisfied, though, and visits Flynn in prison to question him further. Meanwhile, her relationship with Tyler gets messier due to an ill-conceived indiscretion. Mickey files a highly controversial amicus curiae brief in an attempt to retry Flynn and find out Reagan’s whereabouts—a move that puts Mickey’s life in jeopardy. Clary maintains a mood of dread and suspense throughout the novel and particularly excels during the vivid, tense trial scenes and his descriptions of his characters’ attributes, including Mickey’s attractiveness and the shifty police chief’s sartorial uniqueness—he wears a black suit, bolo tie, “and a vest that bulged under the strain from his sizable belly.” Overall, the author creates an imaginative, convincing cast of strong, memorable personalities who carry the mystery along at an impressive clip, although some details at the book’s conclusion seem a bit perfunctory.
Fans of crime dramas will find Clary’s suspenseful yarn a welcome addition to the genre and hope for more to come.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8320-7
Page Count: 330
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
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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