Smart, but echoing too familiarly.
Canadian composer, performer, and now first-novelist MacLachlan attempts a penetrating look at man’s vile desires in a same-old serial killer tale, transported in time to 1852.
“It is impossible to overestimate how truly unbalanced London became during the Chokee Bill panic,” so why try? But that’s the question posed by this examination of press sensationalism, mid-19th-century-style. The murderer in question, already in custody, was nicknamed by London columnist Whitty, who, unlike his editors, at least has a soul: “When the racy ones come a cropper, what hope remains for the high-minded stuff?” But Whitty’s not so high-minded as to turn it down when Owler, a seller of crime stories, offers a partnership to interview Chokee Bill. And when the interview happens, might Whitty begin to wonder whether the right man is really in jail, and might Chokee Bill know who the real killer is, and might he help them find him, and might this all smack a little too much of similar tales already deeply lodged in the collective unconscious? No matter. Beneath the surface here is the suggestion that the lurid hunger of the modern imagination owes its craving to a time even more removed than Jack the Ripper. Whitty’s tour will take him through the bowels of a London on the brink of a sadistic modernity: seedy brothels, cellar mazes, the offices of unscrupulous editors, the parlors of women whose appetites are the invention of erotica, a Piccadilly that “churns in a grey whirlpool of hard-shelled beings like stones in a river, clattering across the cobbles,” and into subterranean chambers and passageways. But as exhaustive as all this is, one wonders whether Gray ever stopped to consider that his artifact wasn’t exactly the object he hoped to criticize: more than the murderer here, the media is the target, but it’s never clear that the project manages to escape the gravity of its own critical insight.
Smart, but echoing too familiarly.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28284-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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