A thriller that's always in motion but, unlike its hero, always knows where it's going.
Travel writer Gabriel Dax, recruited by MI6, continent-hops from Guatemala to London to Berlin on agency business.
Introduced in Gabriel's Moon (2024), Dax has his hands full between his spying and his book-writing, which gives him a handy cover for his undercover work. In March 1963 he is sent to Guatemala to observe the charismatic “Padre Tiago,” an activist ex-priest who may become president. No sooner does Gabriel arrive than a coup breaks out; Padre Tiago is killed, as is his promise to nationalize the all-powerful United Fruit's plantations and return them to the workers. Dax returns to England, where he reignites the passionate (on his end) affair with Faith Green, his manipulative MI6 boss and “puppet-mistress.” She is a prime topic of his discussions with his shrink, Katerina Haas, who encourages him to be his “true self”—a concept with which this novel about people who aren't what they seem has a lot of fun. Then he's sent to Germany to work with a young female CIA agent in tracking Dean Furlan, a shady businessman he encountered in Guatemala; Furlan may have orchestrated two recent attempts to kill President Kennedy in the U.S. and is now in Berlin, a few weeks prior to JFK's state visit. The novel breezes along, with Gabriel making like James Bond, until an anticlimactic epilogue dated November 22, 1963, implies that events in Berlin explain what happened in Dallas. Few literary novelists are as comfortable with espionage tropes as Boyd, who uses the genre as a platform for another of his comically flawed, self-delusional protagonists. An undeveloped subplot involving a Russian triple agent seems likely to be picked up in the next Dax novel.
A thriller that's always in motion but, unlike its hero, always knows where it's going.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780802166272
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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