Psychology-driven crime drama with a learner's permit.
The misadventures of Leona Lindberg, cop and criminal.
A bank is robbed by a naked 7-year-old girl, covered in blood, who plays a recorded demand for money and disappears with the cash. Leona Lindberg, a detective in the Violent Crimes Division of Stockholm’s police force, agrees to take the case; in time the reader learns she is the mastermind of the robbery. Married and the mother of two, Leona finds all her roles confining. Though a neurological condition is never specifically named, she is emotionally disconnected from everyone except her children, is a little compulsive about aligning tables and leveling pictures, and was an abused child. Two years earlier she began the process that would release her from “striving to be like other people,” and the planning and execution of this robbery is a step in that process, and thus “the die is cast,” as the subtitle says. It's not hard for Leona to clog the investigation, but a clever reporter has photos of her with the mysterious bank-robbing child, which he uses to blackmail her for information about a story he has an interest in, and his knowledge remains a serious threat to her plans. Leona reveals a poker habit, both online and live, though the descriptions of hands she plays suggest that neither she nor the author are especially skillful. Leona’s son is diagnosed with a condition requiring surgery, but Leona has lost all of her family’s savings. More robberies are committed, and the situation spirals out of control. But by then it’s hard to care very much about Leona’s fate. In effect, Leona is an assemblage of parts: possibly OCD or on the autism spectrum; a victim of childhood abuse; a gambling addict; a wife bored and confined by Swedish middle-class values; a detective stifled by workplace procedures and chauvinism—all of which (except the poker) are convincingly presented, but unlike the good doctor’s assemblage, she never comes alive. There are similar lapses in the plotting. For example, why do bank officials and bystanders not simply scoop up a bloody, naked child and turn her over to the police? In a later robbery she’s rigged up with a phony bomb, which makes such inaction a little more believable. But by then the plans are beyond repair.
Psychology-driven crime drama with a learner's permit.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59051-882-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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