A spooky, gothic setting disrupted by a totally modern heroine.
A woman with dissociative identity disorder finds herself at the site of the childhood trauma that caused her break, fighting for survival against threats both external and internal.
When Kenetria Nash wakes up, she at first has no idea that she’s been dormant for six years. Following an extreme childhood trauma, Ken developed DID in order to cope, and she and her seven “headmates” live in relative harmony within a castle-shaped inner world, though only three of the personalities, including Ken, are truly able to “front” for long periods of time. While Ken has been slumbering, Della and Solomon have been managing, dealing with Covid-19 and an increasingly precarious financial situation. Ken comes back into awareness standing on a dock, waiting for a boat to pick her up and ferry her to her new job as caretaker at an old estate on an abandoned Hudson River island. If this sounds like the setup for a truly strange horror movie—it is. Managing her various selves is the least of Ken’s problems, even as Della seems to have gone missing, because when they reach the estate, the house turns out to look exactly like the interior castle where all the headmates live. Not only has Ken apparently been here before, but soon her caustic ex shows up with his racist, misogynistic father, intent on hosting some kind of bizarre goblin hunting ritual—in a storm, of course. Her only ally is Celeste, who seems to run hot and cold with Ken, but ultimately may be her ticket to surviving the physical challenges ahead. Of course, she also has to deal with the mental challenges, not least of which involves the existence of a new headmate who looks an awful lot like a ghost spotted on the property. If it sounds a little over the top—it is. But there are enough twists and scares and unique elements to keep you reading. Ken can be hard to like sometimes, but she’s easy to root for.
A spooky, gothic setting disrupted by a totally modern heroine.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063114951
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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