A smart, rewarding psychological thriller, with an emphasis on both of those genre terms.
“How sick can a person get?” So, rightly, wonders a character toward the end of Sweden’s newest entry in the race to claim Stieg Larsson’s throne.
This pseudonymous mystery, the first in a trilogy newly translated into English but published in Swedish in 2010, has been a hit across continental Europe. It’s easy to see why: full of chills and spills, it incorporates numerous hot-button themes, including non-European immigration, extreme-right-wing politics, and slavery, elements of an already dark tale that encompasses incest, genocide, and murder. Add to that a heady brew of shifting identities: a girl flees a dark memory of the Holocaust, abandoning every vestige of the past to become someone new and not altogether wholesome; a psychiatric patient takes on numerous personalities, one of whom is startled to realize, “I’m just a means of survival, a way of being normal, like everyone else.” But everyone else in this story is far from normal: someone is murdering young immigrants from such faraway places as Kazakhstan, former child soldiers from Africa are wandering mad in the streets of Stockholm, and it becomes ever plainer why someone would want to escape the daily grind in the birch and pine woods of the far north by changing masks and dispatching neighbors in spectacular ways. Larsson, of course, covered much of this territory, and even Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö got to some of the unpleasantries in their mysteries of old. Sund updates their scenarios with a well-realized romance between two professional women, a probing look at post-traumatic stress delivered in part by a police inspector who has immigrated north from Bosnia, and many other matters taken straight from the headlines. The story is well-told, though the dramatis personae is daunting thanks in part to all those multiple personalities. It loses momentum about two-thirds of its long way in, too, but it revives as the plot snakes its way into some strange territory indeed.
A smart, rewarding psychological thriller, with an emphasis on both of those genre terms.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-34987-1
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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