A welcome debut that’s both a fleet thriller and a pathology of sisterhood at its most harrowing.
A spin instructor who can’t believe that her sister killed herself looks into the circumstances of her death and unearths a shocking series of secrets that go back to their childhood.
Willa Stannard was a news anchor on KZTV in Chicago until a panic attack ended her career in the middle of a broadcast. When she’s found in her bathtub, her wrists slit and a cryptic note to her sister nearby, all the evidence points to suicide. But Sawyer Stannard can’t believe that the sister she’d grown away from years ago would end her own life. Despite a distinct lack of encouragement from Officer Mallory Curry, she fastens on a true-crime story Willa had pseudonymously immersed herself in for TruthShout, a local newspaper: the kidnapping 26 years ago of 18-month-old Melody Wynne from her parents’ home in rural Michigan. Corbin Campbell, the Trowbridge County deputy who took the lead on the case, never found enough evidence to arrest either Abel Bowen, a neighbor of the Wynnes’ with a criminal past, or self-anointed psychic Merrill Vaughn, who inserted himself into the investigation repeatedly until he died. Why was Willa so obsessed with the ancient case that she not only covered it for TruthShout, but prepared a book-length manuscript, Cry of the Cicadas: The True Story of Melody Wynne’s Disappearance, for literary agent Gemma Matthews? And why does Gemma, who’s supported the project enthusiastically, suddenly have cold feet about submitting it for publication without more solid evidence supporting its conclusions? Producing that evidence will exact a fearsome cost on Sawyer, with anxious readers half a step behind her.
A welcome debut that’s both a fleet thriller and a pathology of sisterhood at its most harrowing.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781639103478
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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