A relatively straightforward performance by the devious Deaver, with fewer open-mouthed surprises than usual, but fewer...
Indefatigable prestidigitator Deaver sets quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme (The Broken Window, 2008, etc.) against a wraithlike terrorist who’s threatening to wreak havoc on New York’s electrical-power grid.
The first incident—within minutes, four electrical substations in Algonquin Consolidated Power’s electrical grid go offline, and a fifth, carrying the enormous load of current that normally would have been divided among them all, throws off a lethal arc—attracts instant attention from the NYPD, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and of course Rhyme, who encourages his lover, Det. Amelia Sachs, to walk the crime scene looking for whatever trace evidence hasn’t been destroyed. Miraculously, predictably, Sachs finds just enough to generate some slender leads. So when the malefactor sends a blustering demand that Algonquin CEO Andrea Jessen execute a rolling brownout across the city, briefly cutting the power in half, and threatening more violence if his demands aren’t met, Rhyme and Co. succeed in keeping casualties down, though not eliminating them. As the clock ticks down to Earth Day and the threats continue to set deadlines for more service interruptions Algonquin refuses to meet, Deaver varies the mix with a series of off-speed pitches. The FBI’s Fred Dellray purloins $100K for an informant who promises results and then takes a powder. Patrolman Ron Pulaski, panicking at the possibility that his cruiser is booby-trapped, accidentally runs down a pedestrian. From his wheelchair, Rhyme assists Mexican authorities in their pursuit of Richard Logan, the nefarious Watchmaker who escaped justice in The Cold Moon (2006). And two visitors with very different agendas offer Rhyme new options for his future. Only the canniest readers will see which of these grace notes are red herrings and which are linked in crucial ways to the case at hand.
A relatively straightforward performance by the devious Deaver, with fewer open-mouthed surprises than usual, but fewer gratuitous plot twists as well. Newcomers to this celebrated series could do worse than to start here.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5633-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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