An enjoyable tale with plenty of suspense and the bonus of intriguing medical details.
In this thriller, a devious serial killer remains on the loose in an Arizona hospital—will the culprit be discovered and stopped before the next victim dies?
Dr. Maya Summer is the hero of Miller’s tale. She is the harried public health director for a Phoenix hospital who also mentors medical residents who will soon be out on their own. Then there’s her self-effacing colleague Alex Reddish and her love interest, the rich and handsome cardiac surgeon Whitaker Thicket. Resident Jim Barrow is OK some days and spacey on others. What is his problem? Another resident is the flirty and presumptuous Veronica Sampson. At first, no one suspects there’s a killer. But after some party punch is spiked and Alex’s bike is tampered with, it soon becomes apparent that someone is up to no good. Between chapters, there are short passages from the killer’s journal—typical aggrieved and egotistical stuff. The Maya-Whit romance finally sours—he was by turns bullying and needy—so will something good happen with Maya and Alex? Unfortunately, Alex’s life may be in serious danger. Miller is not only an experienced novelist, but also a retired doctor, so readers learn a lot about local diseases (valley fever, West Nile, etc.) and drugs both natural and human-made. In that sense, the book is not just entertaining, but educational as well. A subplot, well handled, concerns Maya’s harassment by bikers (she is trying to get the Arizona helmet law reinstated) and a tragic accident in her past. There are also the requisite minor characters, like the grumpy but wise retired physician who counsels Maya and the sweet neighbor kid who loves horses. Phoenix, with its punishing summer weather beautifully described (“The sky stood dazed, a feeble ruined blue”), is almost a character itself, which perhaps explains the gripping novel’s ominous title. A few readers may guess the killer’s identity before the finale. The murderer, like Iago, displays a “motiveless malignity,” which always complicates matters.
An enjoyable tale with plenty of suspense and the bonus of intriguing medical details.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64779-016-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Nevada
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
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
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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