Famous Last Words
by Gillian McAllister
What would you do if your beloved, thoughtful husband inexplicably grabbed a gun, took some strangers hostage in a warehouse and instigated a tense standoff with the police? “Tell my wife that I love her,” the husband, Luke, tells a police negotiator before shooting two of the hostages to death and escaping out the back, seemingly never to be seen again.
After this delectably unlikely opening, McAllister’s latest domestic stress-fest, FAMOUS LAST WORDS (Morrow, 369 pp., $30), jumps ahead seven years. Luke has not been heard from all this time; the dead hostages have never been identified; and Luke’s wife, Cam, a literary agent (and part-time narrator of the book), is trying to distract herself with Charlie, a nice guy she’s dated a few times.
But she can’t believe her once loving husband is gone for good, or that he’s really an assassin. “Sometimes, Cam thinks she sees him,” McAllister writes. There are strange happenings, like a cryptic text she receives consisting of a long string of numbers. Is Luke trying to communicate with her? And what about the clues being uncovered by the former police negotiator in the case, Niall, who has never gotten over what happened and still dreams of solving the mystery?
The pieces of the puzzle emerge slowly, but they come together very nicely. A bonus: the chance to read excerpts from a new thriller submitted by one of Cam’s clients, which form part of the book. “It’s so delicious, the slide into make-believe,” McAllister writes, and she could be describing us as well as herself. “She can almost feel it on her skin like a warm embrace.”
Dissolution
by Nicholas Binge
Binge thoroughly unsettled readers with his last book, “Ascension,” an unusual account of a massive mountain that inexplicably appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In DISSOLUTION (Riverhead, 372 pp., $30), he messes with our heads once more. This chronology-hopping work of speculative fiction about time, memory and scientists run amok is suspenseful, provocative and surprisingly tender.
It begins with an interrogation in what appears to be an empty swimming pool, as a man named Hassan orders an elderly woman, Maggie Webb, to describe the events surrounding their first meeting. “If you don’t start remembering soon, we will run out of time,” he says, ominously. It becomes clear that he’s using Maggie as a conduit to her husband, Stanley, a once-brilliant scientist who lives in a nursing home and has Alzheimer’s.
Or does he? There’s a suggestion that someone is nefariously using advanced techniques to break into Stanley’s head and steal his memories. There’s also a suggestion that Hassan cannot be trusted. Whatever the case, he dispatches Maggie deep into her husband’s past memories and instructs her to unearth a critical piece of information. “The fate of all our lives” depends on it, he says.
Time travel is tricky, and it’s also one of my favorite things. This wild ride of a book was both satisfying and deeply moving, even if I’m not sure I understand everything that happened.
The Last Visitor
by Martin Griffin
In THE LAST VISITOR (Pegasus Crime, 352 pp., $27.95), Tess Macfarlane, a documentary filmmaker harboring a shameful professional secret, gets an offer that sounds too good to be true: A marine research foundation wants her to accompany a small team studying seals on Navigaceo, an island two hours off the coast of Madeira. And, oh yes, she has to leave right away.
If Tess had any sense at all, she would know that if you’re suddenly offered a job in a remote place with limited cell service and reachable only via a boat from the faraway mainland, you should scream “No!” and run in the other direction. Especially when the island is as creepy as this one. “Desolation was the word that most quickly sprang to mind,” Tess thinks when she sets foot on Navigaceo with the three researchers.
Alas, it gets worse. There’s a body on the beach, even though the island has supposedly been deserted for 50 years. The dead person? Steven Clay, a former employee of the foundation, who’s been missing for the last two years. Suspecting that one of her three colleagues killed him, Tess takes it upon herself to investigate, trying to act casual. “The night Steven went missing,” she asks one of the men, Vinny, “do you remember what happened?”
But there’s a lot more going on than a murder investigation in Griffin’s highly atmospheric book, including the necessity for Tess to reconcile the secrets from her past with the exigencies of the present. The plot spins and spins, though some of the developments are MacGuffins. The best character is the island itself.
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