Violent overkill that’ll be too much for most readers.
In Jones’ bloody novel, a pair of violent criminals travels from Texas to New York, murdering, raping and robbing as they go.
Everyone used to say that Taylor Osborn would become a preacher, but after his family is murdered, he drops out of college to become a pimp. His childhood friend Dogg, who murdered his own entire family except for his mother, becomes Taylor’s bodyguard. When the two rob and murder a cop’s brother, they decide that New York is the best place to disappear. At their first stop, a cheap hotel, they pick up some girls, and Dogg proceeds to beat his date to death with a baseball bat. Taylor, meanwhile, ties up his date, and he and Dogg set her on fire with lighter fluid, leaving her in the bathtub to burn alive. Couldn’t the motel clerk identify them? No, he was too busy raping and murdering a girl of his own. This sequence of events gives a fair taste of the remainder of the book. As the dreary, violent, disgusting episodes pile up, it becomes less a novel than a sordid record of random sadism. One criminal after another—met on the journey or in the prison where Taylor and Dogg wind up—is introduced seemingly for no other reason than to augment the list of grisly murders, the body count stratospherically rising. Whole families die; the deaths of teenage girls, 2-year-olds, even infants are described with numbing sameness. The narrative also displays some strangely misinformed ideas of female sexuality, STDs, forensic evidence and the criminal justice system, amid a timeline that’s a bit confused. The affectless prose can be disturbing, too. For example, after the description of a violent rape: “His blood was running hot as he stabbed her eight more times, penetrating the pericardium, which is the covering of her heart and the area surrounding her lungs.”
Violent overkill that’ll be too much for most readers.Pub Date: May 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481736763
Page Count: 234
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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