A layered, thrilling read that will likely motivate fans to read the final book, too.
After escaping Jim Doane, Eve Duncan navigates the Colorado wilderness to gain her freedom, while the people she loves scramble to find and rescue her.
Jim Doane is a father determined to avenge his son’s murder, and to that end, he has kidnapped Eve Duncan, a forensic sculptor, to reconstruct Kevin’s skull. But there are other reasons he wants Eve under his power, secrets in Eve’s past, of which she's not even aware, that will place her in grave danger. After learning some of Doane’s intentions, as well as the shocking truth that compelled him to make Eve a pawn in his deadly plan, Eve has escaped him and must keep out of his reach in dense forest far removed from civilization. Doane is a lifelong hunter, but Eve has great instincts, along with some tricks she’s picked up from her lover, Joe, an ex-SEAL, and she manages to hold her own. Meanwhile, Joe, their adoptive daughter, Jane, and a small posse of new and old friends and allies are using every weapon at their disposal to find Eve. The quest will force Jane and two possible love interests to work together; demand that Joe partner with the mysterious Zander and his enigmatic assistant, Stang; and forge an alliance between Margaret, a complex psychic, and Dr. Kendra Michaels, an investigator with finely honed powers of deduction and observation. Working in different corners of the country, the three teams will ultimately wind up in the same forest where Eve is fighting for her life, but a couple of surprising turns will make her Doane’s hostage again. In an explosive final scene, all seems lost until Margaret opens the door to hope—and another cliffhanger ending leading to Book 3. Johansen’s second in a planned trilogy revolving around Eve’s kidnapping and (readers can only expect) rescue will keep readers engaged in Eve’s fate and intrigued by the many characters who are working together to bring her to safety.
A layered, thrilling read that will likely motivate fans to read the final book, too.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01999-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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