A good beach read if the reader can overlook ponderous plotting and the desire to slap a couple of the characters silly.
A group of middle-aged friends and one rebellious teenager set sail in the Caribbean on a trip to rekindle high-school friendships, but find their lives at stake when things go horribly wrong.
Mitchard (Cage of Stars, 2006, etc.) crams plenty of melodrama and angst into this tale of four old friends who plan an adventure on a plush sailboat at the suggestion of Olivia, the widow of a wealthy Italian. When one of the friends can't make it, Tracy brings her gorgeous 19-year-old daughter, Cammie, in her place. Cammie, who fights constantly with her mother, is foul-mouthed, yet beautiful, as she tries to overcome a recent failed love affair. Tracy's friend Holly, a cheerful nurse and former cheerleader, rounds out the foursome. They soon set sail under star-brilliant Caribbean skies in a luxurious sailboat piloted by down-to-earth Lenny, whose much-younger wife has given him a small child and is expecting their second. His handsome right-hand man, Michel, rounds out the crew. But it doesn’t take long before Cammie and Michel find themselves attracted (she is beautiful, as Mitchard relentlessly says), much to Olivia's displeasure. Soon follow a series of mishaps that leave the four women stranded alone on the large ship with no idea of their location, nor any means to call for help. They weather illness, food and water shortages, the hot, unrelenting sun and man-made terror in their struggle to survive. Mitchard's characters communicate in long, tedious backstory written in clunky prose, and she dubs one major character “the young man” without giving him a name, although every other character in the book, no matter how minor, has one. The women also ignore obvious opportunities to escape their fate in favor of stacking the plot with twists readers will see coming from oceans away.
A good beach read if the reader can overlook ponderous plotting and the desire to slap a couple of the characters silly.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-446-57876-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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