Immersive and compelling—this neighborhood’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.
In Reida’s mystery novel, a street in a tony Atlanta suburb acquires a well-deserved nickname: Murder Avenue.
Adelaide McKenzie can’t believe her good fortune: After growing up in a trailer park, she now resides with her handsome surgeon husband, William, in a huge white mansion that looks like a wedding cake, “the kind you don’t want to slice into because it’s too fancy to eat.” But happy as she is, she knows fairy tales aren’t real. Flaws and secrets, ranging from minor to major, abound among many of her neighbors, including Ray Willis (“There’s something almost reptilian about the way she blinks”); Helen Beecham, who waits each day for 4:00, “an acceptable time for her first Moscow Mule”; adulterer Conner Boyle; homophobe Beverly Grant; racist HOA president Pam Muenster; and neo-Nazi Tripp Schulman. Faith Martin, earning money for college during her gap year, weaves in and out of the homes, doing housework and running errands for the residents. After an extravagant party, two of those people are murdered. Faith is shocked to find that after the murders, there is no sign that such crimes occurred (“Everyone wants to pretend nothing bad can ever happen in a place like this”). But when the killings continue, tensions understandably ratchet up, as do accusations and media coverage. In addition to her evil characters, the author also provides quite a lot of laughs, even as the body count ramps up. (When resident Soon-Li Jung opts for a home elliptical machine instead of a gym membership, the device is only used to hold wet laundry: “It might not help with her heart rate, but it can dry six sweaters at once.”) The killings aren’t grisly and there are some sweet bits, but rough language keeps this mystery from being strictly cozy. A fast pace and a strong ending are welcome features.
Immersive and compelling—this neighborhood’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781684429639
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Keylight Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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