Terrific characters, vivid settings, and a deliciously dastardly, cunningly constructed plot.
An ambitious aspiring writer gets a dream job working for her favorite author.
Andrews' devilishly clever debut opens at a publishing-house holiday party in a New York bar where editorial assistant Florence Darrow and her colleagues are debating "the question asked in countless magazine articles, online forums, and publishing lunches all over town": Who is the author behind the pseudonym Maud Dixon? Someone says they've heard it's a man! As one of the millions of fans of Dixon's debut novel, Mississippi Foxtrot, Florence dismisses the importance of the author's gender. "She knew that, whoever she was, she was an outsider, like Florence herself." Later that night, Florence ends up in a hotel with her editorial director, who happens to be married to a famous actress. "He must have known," Florence later muses, "that sleeping with a young assistant who worked for him had the potential to destroy both his career and his family." But when Florence tries to parlay their connection into a book deal, it is she who ends up losing her job. Oddly, though, she's not worried about being broke and jobless—she's sure the universe is watching out for her. And she may be right, because two weeks later she's asked to apply for a job as personal assistant to Maud Dixon herself. This delightful publishing satire continues for about half the book, and just when you're thinking "Didn't they say this was a thriller?" the wild suspense plot kicks in. The story leaps from an isolated estate outside Hudson, New York, to the dusty medinas and towering cliffs of Morocco, and here the comparisons to The Talented Mr. Ripley start to make sense. At every diabolical twist and turn, Andrews' impish sense of humor peeks around the corner to jack up the fun.
Terrific characters, vivid settings, and a deliciously dastardly, cunningly constructed plot.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-50031-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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