A hair-raising mood piece you’ll be glad to awaken from.
An Australian mother’s retreat to a bucolic eco-village two hours from Sydney is shadowed by ever more menacing echoes of an earlier tragedy.
When her 14-year-old son, Oliver, was suspended from his high school for conduct unbecoming, Alex Ives retaliated against the school, the world, and her abusive mate by abruptly uprooting her children and moving them for a three-month trial rental to Pine Ridge, an alternative community Ollie scorns as a commune for aging hippies and baby Kara is mercifully too young to judge. Everything will be fine, her landlady and upstairs neighbor, Jenny, and Pine Ridge founder Kit Vestey assure her. But everything is far from fine. Maggie, a Pine Ridge veteran, mysteriously takes against her from the get-go, and it’s not long before the other neighbors begin to gossip. A series of increasingly nasty practical jokes awakens rumors of the Pine Ridge witch. Stuart, the abusive restaurateur Alex fled, disappears after threatening to find and punish her. More and more, Alex’s troubles seem an uncanny echo of those that beset Renee Kellerman, whose husband, Michael, once owned the farm that became the site of Pine Ridge: the vandalism, the dead animals, and ultimately the message Renee has apparently sent her: “My son was taken. Yours will be too.” Will Ollie follow the path of Gabriel Kellerman, the teenager who vanished 10 years ago? Downes is less interested in drawing the threads of her mystery together into a tightly logical web than in sowing the seeds of psychological terror, rooted in everyday traumas from sleeplessness to coping with teens, and branching out to create a nightmare world.
A hair-raising mood piece you’ll be glad to awaken from.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2502-6484-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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