Proof, if any were needed by now, that Rimington is better at worldbuilding than storytelling. The threat is real, the...
Those pesky Russians, who just don’t know when to quit, are at it again in this sedate 10th adventure for Liz Carlyle.
Whatever changed when Liz moved from MI5 to MI6 (Breaking Cover, 2016), it wasn’t the activity level of the FSB, the Russian intelligence service. According to Mischa Bebchuk, the army officer–turned–CIA informant, his brother Boris, an FSB officer, is even more anxious than usual because there are rumors of a leak close to the service, something Mischa naturally knows more about than anyone else. What does this wave of anxiety have to do with Lars Petersen, a University of Vermont professor who died shortly after an unusually chatty (and hushed) visit from somebody signing the hospice register as Ohlson, a self-professed old friend from Montreal who was the first person who’d ever come to see him? The link may run through Hamburg’s Freitang School, a gymnasium for immigrant children whose head, Irma Nimitz, seems to be preparing her charges for something her husband, Dieter, who’s with the European Commission for Refugees, thinks may be more than a little iffy—his fears echoing those of Florence Girling, an assistant at Bartholomew Manor College back in Shropshire. Sadly, Ohlson soon vanishes from the story; Dieter spends most of his time fretting; Boris remains offstage; Irma remains in the shadows; and Liz’s most decisive intervention is to get caught snooping around the headmaster’s office at Bartholomew Manor. Amid the general lassitude, only Miss Girling flickers to unsteady life as Her Majesty’s counterintelligence services mostly stand by and watch as a clever cyberterrorist plot trips over its own feet rather than being brought down by their efforts.
Proof, if any were needed by now, that Rimington is better at worldbuilding than storytelling. The threat is real, the bureaucratic infighting sharply detailed, the tradecraft circumspect. The only thing left shortchanged is the plot.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-797-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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