A suspenseful and relentless tale of troubled Californians.
In Mansour’s thriller, a woman seeks vengeance against a Hollywood actor who committed a hit-and-run—even if it means making her own difficult life worse.
Nicola Holiday is struggling from a recent car accident that killed her husband, Ben, and left her and her teenage daughter, Emmy, physically and emotionally scarred. Nicola’s injured leg resulted in her losing her high-paying job, also putting the family in financial straits. By contrast, Bambi Redfern’s life seems idyllic: She’s a model who’s married to a famous movie actor, Jason Redfern, and lives in a large, beautiful house in Beverly Hills. But Bambi’s career and marriage are foundering. She’s emaciated from extreme dieting, and her volatile husband frequently has affairs with his co-stars. Like Nicola, Bambi takes pills to help her cope, but something more salient may connect the two women; Nicola is convinced that Jason was behind the wheel of the white Rolls-Royce that plowed into her family and drove away, apparently unconcerned by the destruction he’d wrought. She’s determined to get revenge, even if it means enlisting the help of a dark, shadowy figure who’s gone too far in the past—one who resides deep within herself. Mansour has created a grim, claustrophobic world, populated by people struggling against their bonds, and these battles give the characters an unexpected depth. Bambi could easily have been portrayed as a smug caricature, like her nepo-baby friend Whitney, but she’s effectively shown to be wrestling with aging and weakened by loneliness; indeed, Bambi finds that “most things don’t register as happiness within her.” Nicola and Emmy both contend with tangible physical pain, but they also suffer in subtler ways, as when Nicola’s past childhood traumas resurface. The sunny skies of Los Angeles also mask an underlying spiritual bleakness; Emmy, for instance, loves watching a Hollywood-based YouTube channel that lets viewers virtually stalk celebrities. In one scene, after a photo shoot on a tawdry, drug-infested stretch of Venice Beach, Bambi smells the sublime fragrance of jasmine—but such brief moments of lightness soon disappear in the waves of darkness that pummel the characters.
A suspenseful and relentless tale of troubled Californians.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9798994814918
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Monikher, LLC
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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