Sleek historical mystery glides by on detail, but lacks plot depth.
Beautiful lawyer, tricked into defending Nazi loot, seeks to undo past wrongs.
Mara Coyne is up for a partnership if she can win one for a major client. Before it can make a lucrative sale, ritzy auction house Beazley’s needs legal defense to prove that a 16th-century masterpiece, The Chrysalis, wasn’t stolen by the Nazis in 1943. As an added incentive, Mara finds that her contact at the auction house is the dashing Michael, an old college crush. Having spent too many years burning the midnight oil for the Manhattan law firm, she’s easy prey, and she and Michael begin a secret affair while she works with Beazley’s formidable expert, Lillian, to prove the painting’s flawless provenance. But two intersecting storylines—one introducing the painting’s secretly Catholic creator who worked in staunchly Calvinist Holland, the other recreating the wartime Jewish owners—foreshadow Mara’s ultimate discovery that documents have been forged and her newfound love is compromised. Teaming up with the elderly, elegant Lillian, who was also deceived by love 60 years before, she jets to London to uncover the truth. Like the painting, Terrell’s debut is full of lovely detail, from the descriptions of the Dutch landscape to the ’40s fashions of the wealthy Baum family. A theme of hidden faith and passion runs solidly throughout this slim thriller. The painter, Johannes Miereveld, pours his secret faith into the painting, which also reveals a forbidden love affair. The Baums, labeled Jews by the Nazis, had thought themselves Catholic. And Mara finds herself recalling her beloved Irish Catholic grandmother as she learns about betrayal and finds her moral core. But the plot is thinner than new varnish. The author telegraphs Michael’s duplicity from the start and the resolution is too quickly tied up through brief or off-stage meetings, and a final letter that seeks to weave all the historical strands together.
Sleek historical mystery glides by on detail, but lacks plot depth.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-345-49466-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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