A knowing, clever, and entertaining visit to the sinister underside of motherhood, good friends, and sunny days.
When three boys discover a corpse on the bike trail, the warm alliance between their moms begins to fracture.
Ward’s latest showcases three women from the upscale Austin, Texas, suburb of Barton Hills. There's Whitney, a real estate mogul who, along with her British husband, sells underground bunkers to billionaire tech bros who are thinking ahead to climate apocalypse. There's Liza, a struggling single mom and a food writer who is barely making rent with odd jobs and dog walking. She's desperately clinging to her membership in the rich mom's club, praying no one finds out how broke she is or asks her anything at all about her past. And there's Annette, a basketball superstar from Laredo turned reluctant trophy wife to the obnoxious heir to a West Texas oil fortune. Over the years of raising their sons together, these women have forged what they believe to be an unbreakable friendship, and as the book opens, they have sent the boys off together to their summer jobs as lifeguards at Barton Springs, an iconic Austin swimming hole. When the trio comes home panicky and panting, reporting that they found a dead woman's body on the greenbelt, their moms are 100% sure the boys didn't know her and had nothing to do with it. That doesn't last long. Ward does a great job of skewering the particular bougie lifestyles and Austin milieux she evokes. She smoothly manages a large cast of characters with a constantly shifting point of view; the disconnect between the kids' reality and the moms' naïve understanding is spot-on. Comic relief is provided by an ongoing text conversation among the Barton Hills Mamas—chardonnayismyjam, teslaluvr, marykaymom, and the rest—for whom gossip knows no limits of decency or taste. But after all the suspense and ticking of the clock, the ending is a head-scratcher. Plausibility aside, what even happened in the final scene? And to the guilty party? The happy ending is nice but, in this case, feels incomplete.
A knowing, clever, and entertaining visit to the sinister underside of motherhood, good friends, and sunny days.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-15944-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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