A lack of clear and consistent narration means the story gets lost in this overstuffed mystery.
The members of a drama club come together in the face of tragedy, unaware they could be the victims of an ongoing fraud.
The Fairway Players are a close-knit drama group in a small town outside London, socially centered around the club's founders, the Haywards and their children. Plans for their upcoming production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons are upended when Martin Hayward, the patriarch of the family and leader of the drama group, announces that his 2-year-old granddaughter, Poppy, has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. An experimental treatment from the U.S. has shown promise but requires the family to raise $350,000. The Fairway Players immediately begin fundraising, but as the money comes in, it seems that the Haywards might be using it for costs unassociated with Poppy's care. At the same time, the Haywards' doctor, Tish Bhatoa, is applying more and more pressure on the family, demanding high payments into her own personal account, which she claims to be using to pay for the medicine from the U.S. A new member of the Fairway Players with a personal history with Tish starts asking questions—about Poppy's condition, the Haywards' past, and Tish's intentions—that could threaten the entire operation, be it real or fraudulent. None of this, however, is told in narrative form. Instead, Hallett introduces the story via Femi and Charlotte, two law students who are reviewing all the case documentation ahead of an appeal in what became a murder case. Emails, newspaper clippings, text exchanges, and handwritten notes are used to lay out the communications between the people in the case, and some characters are only seen through mentions in the emails and texts of others. Femi and Charlotte act as guides for the reader, checking in and sorting through what has taken place every so often. The result is a confusing mix of overlapping half conversations and unconvincing synthesis that attempts to tie together too many threads rather than an engaging mystery.
A lack of clear and consistent narration means the story gets lost in this overstuffed mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-8745-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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