An engrossing yarn about innocence-turned-malignant, by turns hilarious and haunting.
Schoolkids are as devious and dangerous as they are cute in Kelly’s slyly unsettling suspenser.
Tina is a single mom with a checkered past (she barely remembers the drunken hookup that derailed her life and produced her 10-year-old son Matty) who has a toehold in affluent Park Slope, Brooklyn, thanks to a below-market rental and a teaching job at L’il Learners preschool. She loves her charges—vomiting and poop jokes notwithstanding—but wonders about Jonah, a 3-year-old who never talks or plays, especially when his attacks on a little girl escalate from biting and hair-pulling to stabbing with a tack and worse. Jonah’s older sister Darla, Matty’s classmate, is also a problem; her more sophisticated bullying of an overweight boy named Byron progresses to subtle, disturbing bloodshed. Tina sympathizes with Jonah and Darla because their mother Laura recently died in a hiking accident (they say they can see her ghost) and grows even more sympathetic when she meets their handsome, ingratiating father Patrick. As Tina grows closer to Patrick and his kids, she puts aside others’ misgivings even as red flags appear, including hints that Laura’s death might not have been accidental. Kelly’s novel is a mordantly funny portrait of high-end preschools full of well-heeled, judgmental moms and exasperating, antic children. It’s also a plangent reflection on the fragility of relationships—Tina’s decade-long friendship with her landlady Cheryl, whose daughter Naomi she practically raised, goes by the wayside when Cheryl decides she wants more rent. The author’s clever, evocative prose illuminates characters in their labyrinthine complexity—especially Darla’s arresting mix of childishness and dark calculation. (“Darla hates the fat boy so much she would like to bite him and swallow the pieces. She wants to call him fatty-pants again, but this time Naomi and Matty would hear….Darla knows better than to show her friends what she feels.”) From this bad seed sprouts a page-turner.
An engrossing yarn about innocence-turned-malignant, by turns hilarious and haunting.Pub Date: July 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988721369
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Flexible Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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