The Bullet

Starred review from January 12, 2015
Bacon can’t cure everything. That’s one of the lesser discoveries Caroline Cashion, a 37-year-old Georgetown University French literature professor, makes in this heady thriller from former NPR correspondent Kelly, her second novel after 2014’s Anonymous Sources. A life-changing revelation on her MRI—there’s a bullet she has no clue about lodged in her neck—launches the likable and normally unflappable academic, whom Jane Austen would have found a kindred spirit despite her Salma Hayek looks, into a distinctly uncharacteristic flurry of activity. She’s whisked back three decades to her childhood in Atlanta and a shocking, never-solved double homicide. En route, she finds romance with a sexy, country music–loving doctor, Will Zartman, who is so definitely not her type. Kelly pulls off the difficult feat of plotting an action-packed page-turner that remains within the bounds of believability. Agent: Victoria Skurnick, Levine-Greenberg-Rosten Literary Agency.

January 1, 2015
Like Kelly's first novel (Anonymous Sources, 2013, this sophomore effort centers on a beautiful woman who inadvertently becomes involved in a dangerous, high-stakes situation that soon becomes a matter of life or death. Caroline Cashion, 37, isn't drop-dead gorgeous-or at least that's what Kelly has her Georgetown professor tell readers on the opening page. However, a few short lines later, Caroline describes herself as having liquid chocolate eyes and hourglass hips. Men ogle her size DD breasts, and almost every man she meets makes a pass. Caroline is truly one hot chick. But she does have a problem that defies logic: a growing issue with her wrist leads to a series of tests that finds a bullet lodged in her neck. Increasingly drawn to Caroline, her doctor, Will, recommends that she have it removed, which in turn leads her on a journey to discover why the bullet was there in the first place. Soon the Nigella Lawson look-alike finds out that not only was she adopted, but her birth parents were murdered in their Atlanta home when she was a small child. During the as-yet-unsolved murder, Caroline took a bullet that also passed through her mother (a gorgeous woman she closely resembles). Hoping to find answers, Caroline travels to Atlanta, where she meets a cast of fancifully named characters and discovers the truth about the night she was shot. Kelly, a former NPR reporter, wallpapers the story with entertaining but overwrought dialogue ("I knew who you were. Any man under the age of ninety and still in full possession of his faculties would notice who you were") and a surfeit of extraneous characters who clutter the story, weighing it down and distracting from an otherwise interesting premise. Brilliant, beautiful Caroline's astonishingly bad decisions, coupled with her over-the-top reactions as events play out, make her a less-than-sympathetic protagonist in this unbalanced tale of love, perfidy and violence in Hotlanta.

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