A captivating tale, short on mystery but long on entertainment value.
A minor accident has major consequences for two sisters.
Cicely Fairfax has long shielded her granddaughters from the truth about their parents’ deaths. The trouble started 15 years earlier when Cicely’s daughter, Sarah Drummond, began an affair with her husband Charles’ friend Luke. The couples' friendship had waned after Sarah had a falling out with Luke's wife, Lily, who had been her roommate at university. When Sarah was found strangled and Charles stabbed, their deaths were presumed to be a murder-suicide. But Cicely told Abby and Mia that their parents died in a car accident; she took them into her home and changed their last name to Fairfax, refusing counseling for them because they were so young. They’re still close to their former nanny, Nina Phillips, who's the school nurse at St. Catherine’s College. Now both working and on their own, they’re summoned to Cicely’s home to pick out some mementos before she moves to a residential hotel. After Mia falls from a ladder and knocks herself out, she awakens and clearly says, “Mummy, wake up!” Mia’s nightmare continues to haunt her. Instead of discussing it with Abby, she talks to Nina. When she finally opens up to her sister, Abby admits to having had a similar dream. The dreams continue, featuring a man who’s clearly not their father. When Cicely finally tells them the truth, they realize that their parents’ deaths may have been a double murder but despair of proving it after so many years.
A captivating tale, short on mystery but long on entertainment value.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-4483-0978-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Come for the action, leave deeply moved by the fiercely beautiful meditations on maternal love.
How far would a mother go to save her daughter?
Simone Seaborn leaves her home in London for southwest Texas to meet her teenage daughter, Lucy, who’s spent the summer there before starting college. The two have planned a camping trip as a reunion after the longest period they’ve ever spent apart. But almost immediately, the trip seems cursed: Simone’s suitcase is lost—maybe even “on the moon,” according to an airport attendant. She and Lucy are reunited at their Airbnb stopover, only for Simone to wake in the morning and find Lucy missing. Left behind: a phone that begins to ring, “Caller Unknown.” Lucy has been kidnapped. Simone immediately snaps into action, following all the kidnapper’s instructions, including not to notify the police, a decision that her husband, Damien, strongly opposes. She travels to the meeting place only to be sent across the border to Mexico, where she must pick up a package and bring it back to Texas. Simone and Lucy are eventually reunited, but by then things have gone very wrong: Simone shoots the messenger who brings Lucy to the meetup, and then Lucy accidentally shoots an off-duty cop who’s coming to investigate the noise. On the run in the rural Texas desert, mother and daughter strike out to save each other and to clear their names. The plot is convoluted, and even a little absurd, but it keeps you guessing. What truly shines through in McAllister’s fluid prose, though, is the love. This is a novel about motherhood, and mothers and daughters, and the transition from childhood to adulthood. It’s about sacrifice and loss, but also joy, and the tenuous beauty of each moment of life. It’s about saving the day in even the direst of circumstances, and how love between a parent and child is never a loan, but exists forever—past, present, and future—even as time inevitably slips by.
Come for the action, leave deeply moved by the fiercely beautiful meditations on maternal love.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780063338470
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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