Kellerman's mysteries featuring psychologist-sleuth Alex Delaware (When the Bough Breaks, etc.), though intelligently written and thickly textured with realistic illness/therapy detail, have been marred by slow pacing, overwrought effects, and disappointing windups. This new novel—a wildly overblown (640 pp.) police-vs.-psycho thriller set in Jerusalem—is even more of a mixed bag, with page-by-page strengths lavished on a humdrum formula production. A 15-year-old Arab girl is found murdered, gruesomely mutilated and bizarrely laid out, in a Mount Scopus ravine. So Inspector Daniel Sharavi—Yemenite Jew, scarred war-veteran, warm family man—assembles a special cop-team: acerbic old-pro Nahum; part-Chinese muscleman Yosef; Daoud, a bias-sensitive Arab; brash rookie Avi, a flashy ladies' man. And fairly soon the investigating cops are convinced that the girl, a runaway from an oppressive old-world family, was murdered by her shady boyfriend—who was in turn killed by the girl's vengeful, deformed brother. Then, however, a second woman—a Tripoli-born prostitute and drug-addict—is found dead in a forest, identically savaged, obviously victim #2 of a maniac serial-killer. (The reader has known this all along, thanks to periodic close-ups, lurid and shrill, of the nameless psycho.) A third victim is also young, female, Arab—leading to heightened ethnic tensions, which are exacerbated by an unscrupulous newsman. Sharavi, therefore, goes after both sex offenders and rabble-rousers: among the transparent red herrings are a Kahane-like rabbi/racist, an Hasidic child-molester, and a creepy monk. But, with help from the FBI, the Jerusalem cops eventually close in on the real psycho—who, true to genre-cliche (cf., among scores of others, Thomas Boyle's recent PostMortem Effects), snatches Sharavi's small daughter during the chase/showdown finale. Despite graphic swatches of psychosexual case-history, Kellerman's killer—a foulmouthed, masturbating amalgam of hatreds ("Don't move, kikefuck")—remains utterly unconvincing. The treatment of Israel's internal Arab/Jewish conflict, though timely, is annoyingly superficial; the assorted character-touches—like Sharavi's Yemenite back. ground—are intriguing yet ultimately disappointing, as it becomes clear that a thin, derivative scenario is being mechanically padded out to Big-Book dimensions. So, while there's enough solid professionalism here to fill a 300-page police-procedural, at more than double that length this sags and flattens—offering neither the focused, atmospheric suspense of Gorky Park and Pattern Crimes nor the chilling intensity of such other psychomanhunts as Red Dragon and Nightbloom.
Pub Date: March 22, 1988
ISBN: 0345460677
Page Count: 746
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988
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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