This agile thriller makes doing the right thing both nerve-wracking and exciting.
In this novel, a disenchanted man discovers he can go home again—but will he face a killer there?
McGlothlin introduces readers to John Kelton. Not ready to enter the family lumber business, John becomes a teacher in North Carolina. But after his father, Marvin, dies in a hunting accident, John heads home to Watauga, Tennessee. Also returning is his status-driven older brother, Mark, who has been estranged from their father. While John inherited Marvin’s liquid assets, Mark inherited 90% of the timber company. A local coal company with a questionable reputation has made an above-value offer for the business, and Mark is eager to accept and leave town. But John resolves to find a way to buy out Mark and preserve the local economy. His only ally is Elisa Endrizzi, a pretty broker helping him to raise the needed capital. John also finds his father’s death to be suspicious, but he can’t get anyone to believe him, starting with the local sheriff. The harder John pushes, the more he gets trapped in a conspiracy. At one point, he is jailed as a suspect in the death of his father’s flaky girlfriend. But John is determined to solve the mystery of Marvin’s death while simultaneously saving his family’s legacy and staying alive. In this complex mystery, McGlothlin successfully plays long-term corporate responsibility against short-term greed. Although no business executive, John wants to assist those living in his hometown while others profiting from the timber company, initially including his brother, are less concerned with the residents’ fates. John doesn’t help himself by throwing around half-cocked accusations, making enemies of those whose aid he might need. He quickly becomes the boy who cried wolf. But by kicking over every rock, he may eventually get to the truth. Unfortunately, none of the secondary characters are as well drawn as John, Elisa, and Mark. But McGlothlin skillfully muddies the waters with many suspects benefitting from Marvin’s death, which in part results in John’s scorched-earth approach. The story’s biggest drawback is that the true culprit becomes apparent far too soon. Still, the author’s fast-paced narrative makes this taut tale a quick, enjoyable read.
This agile thriller makes doing the right thing both nerve-wracking and exciting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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