Sordid marital drama makes for a searing tale of deceit and manipulation.
A 30-something’s seemingly perfect marriage hides secrets and simmering hostility in Sway’s thriller.
Newlywed Linley Gunn happily leaves her job at a New York publishing house to live in LA with her husband, Dorian. He’s a mega-rich former Wall Streeter who’s now working in the wellness industry. He also has a prenup stipulating that the marriage will be terminated with a $2 million settlement if Linley doesn’t bear a child within four years. Three years in, she still isn’t pregnant and not sure if she wants to be; Dorian has turned cold and now apparently prefers porn to his wife. He also has his eyes glued to Ana, the young, newly hired maid. Linley wants out of the marriage, but she feels that $2 million isn’t enough; she wants to help her parents, who lost their fortune to a shady investor. While she’s already convinced that Dorian’s porn-watching constitutes cheating, an affair with Ana would, per the prenup, leave Linley with much more. It’s not long before things turn exceedingly complicated—and homicidal. Sway masterfully takes readers into the mindset of an unhappy housewife—nonconfrontational Linley believably alternates between quietly stewing over Dorian’s callousness and sadly blaming herself for being unable to conceive. With pithy writing, the author gleefully layers on the melodrama, from the murky pasts of Dorian, Linley, and Ana to intrigues involving Ana’s physically abusive boyfriend Hector and Jarrad, the handsome gardener whom Linley fancies. Linley, however, isn’t easy to relate to; she comes from wealth, knowingly signed a ridiculous prenup, and scoffs at Dorian for “perving” over Ana as she herself ogles Jarrad throughout the story (“Speaking of wild, that’s how my hormones are reacting to seeing Jarrad shirtless”). Still, the novel’s latter half picks up considerably and offers compelling insights into Ana and Jarrad, who occasionally take the narrative reins. Shocking turns beget an unforgettable ending, promising a sequel to follow.
Sordid marital drama makes for a searing tale of deceit and manipulation.Pub Date: March 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798314296295
Page Count: 225
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
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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