A complex, bonkers, and bracing conspiracy tale for adventurous readers.
A thriller set in 1991 focuses on the director of a mental hospital.
Say his name: Heimdallr. From Albania and lower Bavaria to upstate New York, the site of a mental hospital, this densely plotted novel is all over the map and resists an easy synopsis (but in a good way). In Albania, a beautiful widow defies attempts to compel her to become a sex worker for a better lifestyle. A Canadian mining director with suspect intentions hires her as a translator. Things go south quickly, leading readers to Birger Wallenberg, the recently hired director of the Asgard Park Institute for the Criminally Insane. En route by plane, he has a dream of using a remote probe that allows its user to access a psychotherapist’s patient’s mind and to experience what the person sees, feels, and thinks. In his dream, he enters a distant host, a woman who at that moment is flushing down a toilet $10 million worth of crack cocaine that a crime kingpin wants back, instigating the first crisis of Wallenberg’s directorship. In the real world, a schizophrenic from the institute escapes and murders two assailants sent to menace the woman, who’s a well-known scientist, and her 6-year-old daughter. And then things take a mythic turn: Wallenberg meets the institute’s former director, who warns him: “I brought you to Asgard Park for a purpose that is not to your liking.” Meaning Wallenberg must become “the chosen watchman; the vessel of Heimdallr, the god in Nordic mythology credited with social order on Earth.” Simonar has crafted a true What the Heck narrative that expands to include Burton Crane, “a roving troubleshooter,” investigating growing suspicions of “a secret empire out there…the world’s greatest conspiracy to defraud humankind.” The ambitious book is divided into four parts, and it can be easy to lose the thread as the story jumps to new perspectives. But patient and attentive readers will be rewarded when the intriguing strands come together. What keeps the pages turning is best summed up by one character’s declaration: “Wonders never cease at Asgard Park.”
A complex, bonkers, and bracing conspiracy tale for adventurous readers.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-91-987629-0-7
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Eventhor Media
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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