A disturbing story of madness and fortitude that grabs your attention from Page 1.
McPherson shows four women’s lives colliding in a life-or-death struggle in Scotland.
Tash Dodd works at her parents’ trucking firm, where she stumbles upon something that horrifies her. Apparently her father’s business includes human trafficking. She plans to force him to turn over the business to her and then turn him in. Meanwhile, at a meeting of the Nine Lives League, Ivy, a middle-aged woman seeking a cat for companionship, meets Kate, who says that Ivy looks exactly like her sister, Gail, and, suggesting that they might be twins, invites her to their unusual home in Hephaw, West Lothian. Martine is a woman of mixed race who’s searched her whole life for the identity of her father. At a genealogical meeting, she meets Kate, who claims to know who her father is and invites her to her house to meet her sister, Gail. Laura, an attractive woman in search of a fairy-tale life, tries an unusual dating service and is invited to a dinner dance at the home of Kate and her sister. Ivy, Martine, and Laura are all taken captive, drugged, and kept in a dank, putrid basement. Although they’ve all been reported missing, the police don’t look very hard until Tash, who’s been working for various van companies, goes on the run after her father refuses to give up control and ends up in an apartment overlooking an odd house in Hephaw. Trapped while investigating, she and the three brave captives plot to escape.
A disturbing story of madness and fortitude that grabs your attention from Page 1.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-5001-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
Another disappointment from this bestselling author.
What happened to Billy Barringer?
Thirty years after the disappearance of his best friend, Ethan Marsh is back in his childhood home on Hemlock Circle. His mom and dad have just moved to Florida, and they asked Ethan to look after the place until they can sell it, but all three of them know that he needs a place to stay while he tries to get his life back on track. Given that the trauma associated with Billy’s vanishing has turned into a lasting obsession for Ethan—one that disrupts his sleep and casts a pall on his marriage—it seems unlikely that the community he went to boarding school to escape will be much of a refuge, but…sure? As it happens, the babysitter he crushed on as a kid has also come home to take care of her father. Another childhood friend is raising his own family in the house where he grew up. And a one-time bully is now a detective. All of these people were involved in the events leading up to Billy’s disappearance, and they’re all together again when new information about the case surfaces. Sager is a gimmicky author; this isn’t a slam. Horror is a gimmicky genre and, although Sager doesn’t write horror, exactly, his use of horror tropes is a distinctive element of his novels. And fans may well be ready to accept this band of sleuths or ghost hunters or potential suspects working together to solve a 30-year-old mystery. They may, however, be less forgiving of the red herrings and a complicated resolution that raises more questions than it answers. The real sin here, though, is that this book is intensely boring. Ethan Marsh might be a sympathetic character, but he’s not an interesting character, and the narrative pace is punishingly slow.
Another disappointment from this bestselling author.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780593472378
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
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