A dark but exhilarating tale of black magic and religious fanatics.
In this supernatural sequel, a faith healer and his son become targets of a dangerous, misguided man searching for redemption.
As part of a satanic cult’s prophecy, a man named Lucas attempted to kill death-metal guitarist Alec Lowell. But Alec survived and became a popular evangelical faith healer. Lucas escaped arrest and lived on the streets until finding surprising solace at a Christian commune somewhere in the Southwestern United States. Now he believes that to prove his “spiritual worth,” he’ll have to save someone. He tracks down and kidnaps Alec’s son, Jake. Lucas is convinced that the boy, as the son of a false prophet, deserves salvation. The Rev. Jonas Adonis, the commune’s leader, is initially upset by the abduction but eventually accepts that God has led Jake to him. It’s not exactly a tranquil place; many at the commune carry guns, apparently in preparation for an apocalypse. Even their leader is far from amicable, and when Alec comes looking for Jake, Adonis demands he validate his faith healing by performing a miracle. As a few commune members begin distrusting Adonis, they may opt to help the Lowells, and with all those weapons readily available, chaos seems inevitable. Johnson’s novel is relentlessly grim. Characters are generally despicable and won’t earn much reader sympathy, including an individual whom someone kills in a black-magic ritual. But there are standouts in the cast, from Alec’s long-suffering wife, Belinda, who tenaciously searches for her son, to bright 10-year-old Maggie, who separately befriends Lucas and Jake. As in the preceding volume, supernatural components are subtle, like Alec’s ability to heal others. The author sets a brisk momentum by quickly diving into the story, making reading the first book a virtual necessity. A frenzied final act and an unexpected turn deliver a bracing ending that seemingly hints at a third installment.
A dark but exhilarating tale of black magic and religious fanatics. (dedication)Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-831446-0
Page Count: 374
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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