An exhilarating, sorrowful, and terrifying descent into retribution and possible madness.
A nurse, seeking revenge against those who have wronged her, may be slowly losing her mind in this psychological thriller.
Three years ago, Melissa Sweet’s devastating mistake at a Birmingham, Alabama, hospital cost a life and ended her nursing career. Now, she’s back in North Carolina, where her mother and her brother, Noah, live. Though she blames herself for the death that relentlessly haunts her, Melissa struggles to move on. She’s on the right track, in the arms of a softhearted, charming fiance and with a new job at a methadone clinic lined up. Then tragedy strikes, as masked men suddenly introduce violence into her world. In the days that follow, she’s an understandable wreck, likely suffering from PTSD, until Melissa happens upon one assailant’s identity. This ignites her thirst for vengeance, as she hunts down this man and his cohorts, armed with resilience and whatever weapon she can find. But as she metes out her punishment, Melissa may be cracking up—she’s hearing voices and losing her sense of reality. Her increasingly ruthless search, meanwhile, pushes her to a truth she surely doesn’t want to know. Schattel’s novel, which began as a screenplay, runs full tilt. The story moves from scene to scene with glorious transitions, from crashing thunder to voices that wake up a blacked-out Melissa. A convincing backstory (which includes Noah’s history of schizophrenia) along with stunning descriptive passages elevate this tale of apparent mental collapse. For example, the author equates Melissa’s unstable state to being underwater—“everything in dreamy half-motion and submerged by cold rolling waves of shock.” Some readers will guess later plot turns, though that doesn’t dampen their impact on this unforgettably grim tale. Notwithstanding brutal acts on display, the story isn’t as violent as some readers will anticipate. Melissa remains a sympathetic hero whose sincerity, regardless of what unfolds, never dissipates.
An exhilarating, sorrowful, and terrifying descent into retribution and possible madness.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68510-015-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: JournalStone
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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