Madison not only fails to garner any reader sympathy, she comes off like a man in drag, stuck in a plot hindered by details...
Podrug (The Devil to Play, 2006, etc.) pens another tale for the estate of long-deceased writer Harold Robbins, of The Carpetbaggers fame, and explores the dirty underbelly of antiquities procurement.
Who would have ever guessed museum curators can lead such depraved lives? This improbable thriller exposes the money, greed and violence that lingers under the glass of museum exhibits. At the core of the story is Madison Dupre, a woman with lots of shoes and a black American Express card. Shallow, vain and out to claw her way to the top, Madison lands her dream job as curator of the small, private Piedmont Museum. There she sleeps with anyone who advances her career and doesn't spare a moment for life beyond her next acquisition, but when she thinks she's finally made it in the collector-eat-collector world of high-priced antiquities, the foul-mouthed curator finds herself in the middle of a growing scandal. It turns out that a celebrated death mask Madison procured for the Piedmont to media fanfare was really looted from the Iraqi national museum by American troops. When an elderly Iraqi man pops up at a museum gala to shout the truth about the mask, Madison finds her carefully constructed and very expensive world crumbling. Soon she's caught up in multiple murders and a web constructed of lies and unrelenting clichés that threaten her life and will undoubtedly cost her that black Amex she treasures even more than her designer duds. Determined to clear herself, Madison soon goes on the run. The FBI is right behind her, and beside her—both in bed and out—is a handsome rogue who may or may not be a remorseless killer.
Madison not only fails to garner any reader sympathy, she comes off like a man in drag, stuck in a plot hindered by details that seem added as page filler, but the novel picks up once she flees the country for Europe—though the reader may not hang on long enough to pass through customs.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1370-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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