A highly eventful but fast-paced supernatural thriller.
In Armstrong’s paranormal mystery, a young woman, haunted by a ghost, joins her adoptive family’s private investigation business and becomes entangled in a case involving child kidnapping and trafficking.
In Rubyville, Virginia, 21-year-old private eye Justyne Diamond “JD” Wolfe is no stranger to tragedy. After she lost her mother to a hotel room fire at age 8, a stringy-haired, lavender-smelling female ghost who was haunting her drug-abusing mom transferred to her. Events often descend into chaos when the spirit’s spectral presence is around. Also, JD believes that the ghost abandoned her early on, when the young girl was molested by a 16-year-old boy in St. Francis’ Group Home for Lost Souls. A few years later, a military family adopted JD; they owned an agency called White Wolfe Investigations. Now, as an adult, she’s determined to prove her worth as a PI—and as a member of the Wolfe family. But JD’s first job goes awry, and soon, straightforward surveillance missions lead to an investigation into murders and kidnappings connected to an international trafficking organization. The pace of Armstrong’s mystery is swift, but it effectively allows space for a number of emotional subplots: JD grows close to a local baseball hero’s unclaimed child and his large, loving Italian family, and she explores her relationships with her own painting talent and with a scarred bomb-disposal veteran. She also investigates possible infidelity between her father and his deceased best friend’s wife. JD’s voice often seems distractingly mature for her age at times, but the novel’s treatment of her insecurity rings true throughout. Some readers may find a few comments problematic; there are multiple comparisons of characters to Asian celebrities but no Asian characters in the novel, other than a villainous one. Delicate subjects and traumatic recollections involve child sexual assault, human trafficking, suicide bombing, and PTSD.
A highly eventful but fast-paced supernatural thriller.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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