Brains beat brawn in this engrossing yarn, and a mind without a memory makes Toyne's hero a hard character to—well, to...
Second book in the Solomon Creed series (The Searcher, 2015), this imaginative thriller takes root in the Holocaust and sprouts in modern-day France.
Josef Engel bleeds to death from a Star of David carved into his chest, and the killer uses Engel’s blood to write “Finishing what was begun” in German on a wall. Engel had been one of four tailors in Die Schneider Lager—The Tailor’s Camp—in a concentration camp. He “should have died in the camp” 70 years ago, says his killer, one of the men searching for Die Anderen—The Others, the survivors, who for a mysterious reason must all be killed. Enter Solomon Creed, a strange and pigment-free “pale man” whom the police suspect in the murder. He is a “high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic” with an “off the charts” IQ, a phenomenal “know-it-all mind,” and no idea who he really is—his only clue is the label inside his perfectly fitting jacket saying it was “made to treasure for Mr. Solomon Creed.” He can't remember that it came from tailors grateful that he had rescued them from a concentration camp, including Josef Engel. That’s because his psychiatrist, Dr. Cezar Magellan of the Institute of Criminal Psychology, has implanted a device in his shoulder to remove toxic memories. Creed goes looking for the man who made his jacket, but he arrives too late. Meanwhile, Engel's granddaughter, Marie-Claude, lives with her superhero-loving 7-year-old son, Léo, and apart from her abusive criminal ex-husband, Jean Baptiste. Creed protects them and finds a commonality with Léo: they both have forms of synesthesia. Creed can smell danger, while Léo sees emotions as colors in the same way Engel did. To Léo, “Nice people have bright colors,” and bad people don’t. Why Solomon Creed can return 70 years after the Holocaust is a mystery that won’t bother readers at all. He just does, and the bad guys will have to deal with it.
Brains beat brawn in this engrossing yarn, and a mind without a memory makes Toyne's hero a hard character to—well, to forget.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-232975-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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