A sequel that whets your appetite for another taste of life in West Mills.
A triple murder shocks a small North Carolina town into confronting its deepest fears and darker secrets lingering in the wake of the civil rights era.
Winslow follows up his widely praised debut, In West Mills (2019), by returning to the eponymous Southern locale of that multilayered romance with a murder mystery set in the mid-1970s. The story begins shortly after the bullet-riddled bodies of Dr. Marian Harmon, her sister, Marva, and brother, Lazarus, are discovered at the foot of the staircase of their home in the predominantly Black western section of West Mills. As readers of the earlier novel will recall, the hamlet is divided along racial lines by a small canal, and even after Jim Crow’s demise, the scars of racial segregation remain deep and raw. The town’s sheriff’s department regards their first homicide in decades as little more than a drug-related break-in, even after they interrogate, then release, the siblings’ half brother, Olympus “Lymp” Seymore, who was first suspected because of an argument he’d had with the three Harmons. Arrested or not, Lymp nonetheless walks around town with a taint of suspicion. And this deeply distresses Josephine Wright, a middle-aged native daughter of West Mills who has returned home after a 48-year stint in New York City to make a new life for herself with her childhood friend Lymp. Jo decides to remove any doubts about Lymp’s innocence by wandering around town asking who else might have a motive for murder. Is it Eunice Loving, who had taken her son La’Roy to Dr. Harmon to “have the gay removed” but was later horrified by the doctor’s violent methods? Is it Ted Temple, the town’s most prominent White real estate mogul, who was landlord for the Harmons’ home and, until a bitter dispute separated them, Marian’s secret lover? Or could it have been Ted’s daughter, Savannah, who more than a decade before had been ostracized by her father and exiled from the predominantly White part of town because she’d fallen in love with a Black man? Or could it have been Lymp after all? Jo isn’t sure of anything, but she proves a relentless and incisive sleuth, not just in pursuit of what happened, but in untangling the complex social dynamics within the seemingly bucolic rural Carolina hamlet. Though not as intricately woven as Winslow’s first novel, this tale comes across as considerably more than a regional whodunit because of its author’s humane and sensitive perceptions toward his characters, even those who may not deserve such equanimity.
A sequel that whets your appetite for another taste of life in West Mills.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-63557-532-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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