Unevenly paced, stomach-churning psychological horror not for the faint of heart.
After an accident, a young man starts to have violent and twisted thoughts.
Melvin Frink is a neuropsych student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with an obsessive interest in the science of lobotomy, hoping to research the procedure and bring it back to the forefront of psychological treatment. With a seemingly meek and nerdy disposition, Melvin has an abusive, controlling, rich mother who keeps him on a short leash, but he wants to get away one day. His hopes are dashed when after a freak accident, he spends three years in a coma and wakes up to find himself trapped and still under his mother’s control. As his mind struggles to adapt, Clark’s protagonist begins to have violent urges toward women and especially his mother. As he regains control of his body and mind, he concocts a plan that will ensure that his mother and other women will never again humiliate or control him. The plan involves an operating table and cages in the basement of his family’s mansion, a place that used to hold a crematory and that will be where he keeps the girls he intends to kidnap quiet and subservient. But Melvin didn’t count on a campus police force willing to go the extra mile to track down girls who have recently gone missing or that he would find the perfect, willing victim in the most unexpected place. An omniscient narrator follows these and other characters in a twisted, dark psychological terror story. Full of graphic sexual and physical violence that at times crosses the line into gratuitous imagery, the story focuses primarily on Melvin, his tormented life, and the violence he inflicts on others. Both victim and perpetrator, he embodies a cycle of psychopathic abuse at the intersection of nurture and nature. The uneven pacing—slow at first, especially when describing the torture of the female victims, but rushed toward the end—further limits the appeal of a grisly tale.
Unevenly paced, stomach-churning psychological horror not for the faint of heart.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2021
ISBN: 979-8779134583
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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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