Fast, proficient, and utterly forgettable. Lucas’ wife, Weather, says it best when she tells her husband: “Don’t get shot;...
Lucas Davenport, of Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, celebrates his 25th appearance by crossing state and jurisdictional lines in pursuit of a killer who’s made the pursuit personal.
Lucas’ adopted daughter, Letty, first hears about Porter Pilate in faraway San Francisco when she takes time off from her studies at Stanford to buy a meal for a pair of hapless buskers named Henry and Skye, who ramble about a man they call the devil. Pilate may not be the devil, but in addition to selling drugs, he gets his kicks by killing people. He and his demented crew of fellow travelers (imagine Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters with a fondness for rape, torture, and homicide) have claimed 10 victims so far—11, once he lures Henry to a secluded spot, crucifies and castrates him, and hacks him to death. Letty, hearing rumors of Henry’s gruesome end from Skye after she's returned to Minneapolis, moves heaven and earth to bring the young woman from Rapid City, where she's hiding out, to Minnesota, but Pilate and company are already close by, en route to the Gathering of the Juggalos, followers of the Insane Clown Posse. Skye soon falls into Pilate’s clutches, and her fate inspires Lucas, whom Letty has pulled into the case, to track Pilate and his disciples from Minnesota to Michigan’s isolated Upper Peninsula. Mayhem follows. What doesn’t follow is much suspense, any memorable characters, or even any strong rooting interest, since Pilate’s 20 followers can be picked off one or two at a time without seriously compromising his bogeyman reputation as he schemes to kill Lucas, or maybe Letty. Lucas deals with a lot of county sheriffs, deputies, and investigators from three states and phones several others long distance.
Fast, proficient, and utterly forgettable. Lucas’ wife, Weather, says it best when she tells her husband: “Don’t get shot; it’d be really inconvenient for everybody.”Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16879-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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