A robust if sometimes blunt thriller set in the world of wine.
In Laine’s thriller, a wine expert helps an ex-girlfriend embroiled in corporate intrigue.
Napa Valley restauranter and Master Sommelier Dante Lombardi has the best wine palate on the West Coast. Even old flames trust his tongue, which is why he’s been invited to a tasting at the offices of Scarcity Incorporated, where his ex-girlfriend Dr. Claire Durant serves as chief scientist. Claire almost married Dante years ago—now a widow, she harbors secret feelings for him still. She wants Dante to grant his imprimatur to Replivino, a line of synthetic wines that mimic the finest varietals in the world. Though Dante is fooled during the test, he refuses to endorse the product on principle. Wine, he protests, isn’t “something you can recreate in a test tube.” After the tasting, Dante’s best friend and chef, Angelo (who also happens to be Claire’s brother) takes his own life, and the restaurant loses a Michelin star. Then Claire goes missing with Scarcity’s Vino Code—the formula behind Replivino—just two weeks before the company’s IPO. No one knows if she’s been kidnapped, blackmailed, or plans to sell the formula—or if her disappearance has anything to do with Angelo’s death. Scarcity hires Dante to track down Claire and the Code, a journey that takes him across Europe. Can “the Sherlock Holmes of wine” find his ex, or will the Master Sommelier find himself tricked once again? Laine knows his angle, and he cleverly layers wine culture into nearly every interaction in the book. Here Dante gets romantic with Scarcity lab technician Vivian Wong: “His mind swirled. Time had no meaning. ‘And how do I taste?’ Vivian asked. She pulled away, breathless, face flushed, eyes wide. ‘Strawberries…’ Dante said. She kissed him again. ‘Red cherries…’ ….and again. ‘Candied fruit and bubblegum, like a Beaujolais Nouveau.’” Both the characters and the plot are thinner than they should be, but wine lovers will likely enjoy this page-turning ode to their favorite beverage.
A robust if sometimes blunt thriller set in the world of wine.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781663260352
Page Count: 388
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
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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