Keen characterization drives a somewhat cold but thought-provoking crime tale.
A young gay man in 1960s Chicago is wrongfully accused of murder in Fritsch’s novel.
Twenty-something bank accountant Ted Linden comes home to a shock—his live-in boyfriend’s dead body. Someone has slashed 19-year-old Warren Hadley’s throat in their backyard garden. Ted wastes no time in pointing the finger at Darrel, Warren’s virulently homophobic older brother. As if losing his beloved partner weren’t enough, Ted suffers backlash following media coverage of the killing. Some of this is sadly unsurprising, such as his boss’s pique following Ted’s frank statements to reporters regarding his gay relationship. But he’s blindsided when he’s accused of Warren’s murder. Ted has little doubt that the real culprit is Darrel, but until the police can prove that, he must prepare to defend himself in the event he is indicted. And if Darrel is truly innocent as he claims, will it be up to Ted to find the murderer? The author’s quiet story is only nominally a mystery; things simply come to light, as neither Ted nor the amiable investigating local detective, Tim Conway, dig up any clues. There’s sharp, abundant social commentary taking aim at the Vietnam War and racism, among other topics (Warren, speaking of Darrel, suggests, “He should tell the draft board he’s homosexual. You know, he likes other men. After he does that, they won’t let him near the straight guys they’re sending to die in Viet Nam for no good reason at all”). The author develops the relatively small cast well; Ted and Warren, for example, have drastically different experiences coming out to their respective families. Unfortunately, readers barely get a glimpse of the couple’s 14-month romance before its tragic ending. Moreover, Ted’s passionless first-person narration fails to illustrate the dismay he must surely feel. While some readers will guess the ending, it still packs a punch as it reckons with the aftermath of such events for an openly gay man in the mid-20th century.
Keen characterization drives a somewhat cold but thought-provoking crime tale.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2023
ISBN: 9798985072631
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Asymmetric Worlds
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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