As in many of Johansen’s novels, readers are left dangling when it comes to Cara’s fate and must purchase the next one to...
Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan’s back in the game in perennial bestseller Johansen’s latest bloody action thriller.
Cara Delaney, an 11-year-old girl, is rescued by renowned forensic sculptor Eve Duncan and her lover, Joe Quinn, from the vicious killers employed by the Salazar drug cartel. Cartel killers have already murdered little Cara’s sister, Jenny, and Elena, the nursemaid who ran away with Cara to protect her from further harm. Now that Elena is dead, along with cartel assassin James Walsh, Eve and Joe have taken the little girl in until her life becomes less precarious. A great many complications ensue: for one thing, Cara is the daughter of Juan Castino, another Mexican drug kingpin, and they must be careful not to attract his attention or he will try to get Cara back. Eve’s afraid that Cara won’t survive in the middle of a drug cartel war, particularly since an especially vile young killer, Franco, is hunting for them. After Eve makes a startling discovery, she and Cara go on the run and end up in the Scottish Highlands with Eve’s adopted daughter, Jane, and some friends from past novels. Johansen fans will catch a veritable treasure trove of characters from her previous novels in this latest venture, with only the villains new to the strange world Eve inhabits. This book, like many of Johansen’s novels, features a child genius (Cara plays the violin so beautifully the characters do everything but weep when they hear her) and a smattering of individuals boasting mystical abilities (an animal psychic; a man who has weird powers over other people’s blood). There are a few action sequences, but mostly the characters talk a lot, many times in lengthy back story, making for an especially dull been-there-done-that reader experience.
As in many of Johansen’s novels, readers are left dangling when it comes to Cara’s fate and must purchase the next one to find out what happens.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07582-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
