Secrets and lies collide in this sinisterly effective thriller.
A young woman gets more than she bargained for as she strives to unravel her father’s past in Adams’ novel.
The implosion of lives built around carefully kept secrets is one of popular fiction’s most enduring story arcs; that’s the psychological terrain Sofia Ryan finds herself occupying after her father, Aidan Ryan, suddenly vanishes, leaving wads of cash and a stern missive (“I have a new life now and must never see you again”) that sheds no further light on his rationale for making such a move. Fearing that her father has met with foul play, Sofia discovers otherwise after combing through a box of his personal items. She soon realizes that nothing about her father’s backstory as she knows it is genuine, prompting an international trek from Boston to Northern Ireland and Rome in search of answers. At the core of the riddle of Aidan’s past is the Brotherhood, a shadowy religious order (“The stories of their heroic deeds characterize them as a kind of Irish Knights Templar”) with whom Sofia’s father is intimately intertwined for reasons that are murky, at first. If the unexamined life is not worth living, Sofia—finding herself at a harrowing crossroads—comes to realize that an overly interrogated one can be downright murderous. The narrative is founded upon a conceit that built the brands of artists like Dashiell Hammett and Alfred Hitchcock, one that could easily go awry in less adept hands. Happily, that’s an outcome that Adams’ novel deftly avoids by virtue of its no-nonsense pacing and tight plotting—a particularly impressive feat, considering the story skips decades and is liberally sprinkled with flashback fairy dust. Getting the details right, as the author has done, goes a long way toward ensuring an enthralling read. This hair-raising roller-coaster thrill ride may leave readers questioning their own personal narratives.
Secrets and lies collide in this sinisterly effective thriller.Pub Date: April 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798885281256
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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