An entertaining beach read with the potential for a sequel.
A spunky new stringer for a local North Carolina newspaper scores a major scoop in Thomas’ novel.
It is the Spring of 1971 and Amanda Blackstone, freshly graduated from Chapel Hill, is at her fourth job interview. Her confidence waning, she enters the office of Allen Parks, executive editor of the Coastal Herald, the daily newspaper for the small town of Compton, North Carolina. Her enthusiasm (“Well, I’ll give you this: you’ve got…uh, spirit, shall we say”) convinces Parks to give her a chance, a one-month probationary period as a stringer. Her first assignment: a fluff piece on the opening of a new grocery store. Accompanied by staff photographer Josh Bennington, Amanda is conducting her initial interviews when she notices an unmarked delivery truck removing rather than delivering boxes of produce. She convinces Josh to help her track down what is happening (it’s a drug operation), and so begin her adventures as a new reporter. But a much bigger story is on the horizon: When she is paired with staff writer Patrick Maguire to cover a county zoning hearing, she learns about Jack Lockwood and the real estate empire he has been building in Compton, leading to an investigative journey that will test her mettle and put her life at risk. Thomas provides enough action and plot twists (including family secrets, a suicide that may be a murder, and blackmail) to keep readers guessing and turning the pages, even though the final reveal is not a total surprise. Adding to the dramatic stakes are a budding romance between Amanda and Patrick and one character’s unexpected and tragic death. The narrative develops at a steady pace, and, with the benefit of Thomas’ professional experience as a publisher’s assistant, it provides an intriguing insider’s view of the operation of a small-town daily. Amanda is an engagingly strong female protagonist, feisty, relentlessly inquisitive, and fearless—some might say reckless.
An entertaining beach read with the potential for a sequel.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798822919686
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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