Although the beauties of the area remain the same as in The Weight of Night (2017), Carbo introduces a new sleuth, plenty of...
An FBI agent struggles to help the father of her child.
Ali Page is an FBI investigator in Montana, far from the New Jersey home where her dysfunctional early life left her with emotional problems. But her pain is nothing compared to that of Reeve Landon. Even after fathering their much-loved child, Emily, Reeve was unable to commit to marriage. Ever since he accidentally shot his best friend when they were 9 years old, guilt has ruined his life. Following a series of teenage run-ins with the law, he finally got a degree and a job in the wilderness near Glacier National Park, where he and McKay, his hyperactive dog, track down animal scat for the University of Montana’s research program. When reporter Anne Marie Johnson spends the day with him for an article on his job, he finds her attractive, but he’s put off by the questions she asks about gun control and his past. Soon after Anne Marie is found dead outside a cabin she's borrowing from a friend, Reeve is arrested. Nervous and resentful, he doesn’t admit that Anne Marie was in his cabin, and even though he’s released, it’s obvious that the police consider him their main suspect. Ali, knowing that it’s a conflict of interest for her to get involved but worried that the police won’t look at anyone else, uses her position to get information from police and coroner’s reports and questions people she thinks may be involved. Although Anne Marie has written stories on wildlife, her current focus on gun control has led her to interview some dangerous people. While Reeve uses his job as an excuse to escape into the mountains with McKay, Ali digs herself deeper into trouble trying to prove him innocent.
Although the beauties of the area remain the same as in The Weight of Night (2017), Carbo introduces a new sleuth, plenty of angst, and a tighter plot that switches back and forth between the thoughts of the heroine and the hero.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5633-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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