Fans savvy enough to ignore the ill-advised extras and keep their eyes on the duel between Rhyme and Unsub 40 will be...
The latest of Lincoln Rhyme’s fiendishly inventive antagonists is a killer who rails against rampant consumerism online, then hacks into the Internet of Things to murder New Yorkers who’ve grown too attached to their computer-driven toys.
Following a spotting of the perp dubbed Unsub 40 in a crowded shopping center, the NYPD’s Amelia Sachs is at the point of apprehending him when a calamitous escalator accident claims her attention and bystander Greg Frommer’s life. Unsub 40 escapes to plot further sabotage of the microchips that regulate the behavior of common household and industrial devices that might otherwise turn nightmarishly lethal—though he’d be even happier with the kind of hands-on violence that allowed him to swing a ball-peen hammer or wield a razor-sharp saw. Amelia directs Frommer’s destitute widow, Sandy, to attorney Evers Whitmore and quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme (The Skin Collector, 2014, etc.), who’s now left criminal investigation to teach forensics and concentrate on civil cases, for their help in preparing a liability lawsuit against—well, against anyone they can find with plausible liability and substantial assets. For a while, it looks as if Amelia and Rhyme, her sometime lover, will be competing for expert help and resources. But their two cases predictably join together, freeing them to focus together on what they do best: turning over every clod of dirt in the Big Apple in search of Unsub 40, who continues, through a combination of cunning and uncanny good luck, to elude them. Deaver, evidently worried that he hasn’t provided a generous enough banquet of felonies, interleaves a couple of complementary cases for Rhyme and Amelia’s associates, but these are both subpar and distracting, though they do allow another of his patented multistage, 60-page denouements, though this time with gradually diminishing returns.
Fans savvy enough to ignore the ill-advised extras and keep their eyes on the duel between Rhyme and Unsub 40 will be treated to all the usual thrills, which are worth every breathless minute.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3634-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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