An intricate legal thriller revolving around the nature of the self.
In Stuart’s legal novel, a case of mistaken identity takes on a dark new meaning.
Martin Cheshire is being tried for the murder of his twin brother, Arthur. Before the trial can happen, however, the state must make sure that Martin Cheshire is Martin Cheshire—and not Arthur Cheshire, as he claims. “Perhaps the only thing the government and the defense agree on is that none of us are confident about who Mr. Cheshire is,” the prosecutor admits. “Is he Arthur, as he now claims to be, or is he Martin, as he originally admitted he was?” Complicating things further is the long history of the brothers impersonating one another—and the possibility that the man in custody, whatever his name is, may not be fully sane. It falls, in large part, to Dr. Lisbeth Socorro of Psychiatric Evaluation Services to solve this puzzle via thrice-weekly sessions conducted at a San Diego detention facility. She patiently works to draw the story out of Martin (or is it Arthur?), a story of a rough childhood living with foster parents in Portland, Maine. His story is also one of deception, embezzlement, arson, and the strange game the twins liked to play called “Hide and Be.” Stuart succeeds in capturing the distinct personalities of his characters, from the blustery judge overseeing the case to the believably psychotic twins. Here Arthur describes his experience of posing as Martin and sleeping with Martin’s girlfriend: “Once we got into it, I let her lead, like Martin said she liked. That was odd though. She was passive about a lot of things, or so he had said. But in bed, she liked to be in charge. That took all the thinking out of it for me. This was just what I wanted…” The author’s career as a trial lawyer comes through in the minutiae of the courtroom scenes, and in the attention to detail throughout. Readers will enjoy piecing together this strange mystery, which avoids the obvious twists in favor of stranger ones.
An intricate legal thriller revolving around the nature of the self.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781736894668
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Gl Stuart Enterprises
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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