Fans of crime fiction will love this one.
Nottingham forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven investigates a mass migrant murder in his fourth outing.
Cyrus and his friend Evie Cormac—born Adina Osmani—are enjoying a day at the beach when a woman screams that someone is floating in the ocean. Cyrus swims to the rescue, but he’s too late. Then more bodies float in, 17 in all with but one survivor. They had come from the Middle East, desperately trying to reach British soil. But miles out in the English Channel, another boat had rammed into their inflatable dinghy, sinking it. Who? Why? Was it an accident? Was it xenophobia, a warning to keep foreigners out? Or does it go deeper? A mysterious ferryman is said to control the human trafficking across the channel, but most people think him a bogeyman, the stuff of ghost stories. Then the lone survivor is murdered; how will police ever learn what happened now? In Scotland, Cyrus is told, “Oh, that’s a dangerous beastie, the truth, a monster in the loch.” Cyrus and Evie narrate alternating fast-paced chapters that will rivet the reader’s attention. Both have backgrounds you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Cyrus’ older brother murdered their parents and two sisters. Evie, from Albania, lost her family and has been sexually trafficked and tortured. “Coin-sized lesions” from cigarette burns pock her legs and abdomen. Cyrus fostered her, and they have become good friends. The interplay between the two main characters makes the story stand out. She’s attracted to him, but the feeling is not mutual. He cares deeply about her, but he’ll never violate his professional ethics. So she’s both jealous and happy knowing that he’s “bumping uglies” with a more appropriate woman. In his words, Evie is “damaged and self-destructive and a pathological liar, but she is also funny and feisty and intelligent and empathetic.” There’s also a great secondary character from Zimbabwe who deserves a role in Cyrus and Evie’s next adventure.
Fans of crime fiction will love this one.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668030998
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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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