Koch is consistently attuned to our hidden foibles and fakery, which makes for deliberately discomfiting reading. Sleeker...
A man contemplates getting back at the novelist who exploited his life in fiction.
Koch’s third novel translated into English (Summer House with Swimming Pool, 2015, etc.) is partly a satire of the petty grievances of the literary world, partly a vision of sociopathic cruelty, though ultimately a little too much of both. The “Mr. M” of the title has had a long career writing novels that have garnered heaps of acclaim but modest sales—with the exception of Payback, his bestselling fictionalization of a much-discussed news story about a pair of teens who were accused of killing a teacher who’d had an affair with one of them. Herman, one of the students allegedly involved, hasn’t been able to let go of the experience decades later; indeed, he lives in the same building as the writer, and as M makes the publicity rounds for a new novel, Herman is increasingly invasive of his personal space, stalking his wife and posing as a journalist to ask some pointed questions of him. Koch (via Garrett’s translation) does a fine job of capturing Herman’s arrogant, narcissistic swagger (“I have certain plans for you…”; “Who are you trying to impress…?”), but he wisely pivots away from Herman’s narration to include multiple perspectives—Mr. M, the troubled teacher, and the classmates who witnessed Herman’s high school antics. (He enjoyed taunting a classmate whose mother was dying, for instance.) Koch suggests that in some ways Herman and M are similar—both exploit others’ pasts, have mean streaks (M fantasizes about mass-murdering his readers), and have troubled pasts to cover up. But that argument isn’t wholly persuasive—Herman’s adolescence was crueler—and the layering of Herman’s back story overwhelms the core mystery story of what truly happened with that teacher.
Koch is consistently attuned to our hidden foibles and fakery, which makes for deliberately discomfiting reading. Sleeker writing would enhance its impact.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90332-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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