A compulsively readable mystery and character study.
In Bokat’s thriller, a troubled woman becomes entangled in a mystery during an island trip.
Natalie Greene, a 41-year-old food photographer, brings a lot of emotional baggage with her to the Cayman Islands, where her “powerhouse” stepsister, Isabel, a famous self-help guru, is the featured speaker at an upcoming Happiness Conference. Natalie’s stepfather recently died, and she’s haunted by a car crash nearly three decades ago that killed her mother. In addition, her husband has left her for another woman. The physical damage from the accident has healed except for the effects of a brain injury that erased much of her memory of the tragic incident. In the Caymans, she’s involved in another car accident at night; a strange man at the scene tells her and her stepsister that their vehicle hit a dog that then ran away. The next day, though, Natalie finds that her bumper, which had been spotted with blood, is now mysteriously clean. The mystery deepens when, upon her return to her home in Boston, she receives an anonymous email that reads, “You were lied to about that night. Have you asked your sister about the blood on the car? The guy who was there knows.” She soon meets Jeremy Sonnenberg, an investigative reporter writing a book about the happiness movement, and he helps her unravel a decades-old mystery. Bokat is an evocative wordsmith—as when she describes “sadness coating [Natalie] like oil”—and she has crafted a sympathetic heroine as her main character. Over the course of the novel, the author presents a psychologically nuanced portrait of a woman whose family regards her as “the sensitive one”; for example, when sparks fly between Natalie and Jeremy, she immediately wonders “if he was just another man who would disappoint her.” The book also reveals Natalie’s struggle not to be defined by her childhood trauma. Readers follow the protagonist as she works to untangle “a constrictor knot of lies” and wonders if she can have faith in people she’s always trusted.
A compulsively readable mystery and character study.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-057-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
