Gotham might be a perilous place for most, but it’s the perfect spot for a writer in need of material.
A famous writer’s hunt for a blackmailer plays out against the corruption and colorful characters of turn-of-the-century New York City.
“My past is a locked book and I vow it will remain so,” declares William Sydney Porter, better known as short story master O. Henry, in Yagoda’s novel of the writer’s later years. Porter might want to keep his past hidden, but an anonymous blackmailer threatens to reveal it (Porter served prison time for embezzlement) unless he pays him the ungodly amount of $50 a week. (Yagoda notes that $1 back then would equal $36 today.) Though a fellow former inmate suggests he shouldn’t hide his past but instead write about the bad living conditions behind bars, Porter is worried that his secret will ruin his rising literary reputation. “The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain,” he says. “If the world once sees it, you are doomed.” The editor of an acclaimed edition of O. Henry’s stories for the Library of America, Yagoda brings his research skills, knowledge of the author, and love of the era to this tale of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, evoking its crowded streets, many vices, and colorful (and often dangerous) citizenry, not to mention the lucrative world of freelance writing at a moment when short stories reigned supreme. He weaves in a second story of a young artist named Anna, who struggles to support herself and gets enmeshed in the blackmail plot against Porter, who happens to live in the same building. With a dubious detective acting as a middleman between Porter and the blackmailer, the writer soon seeks help from a wide-ranging crew—including a street urchin named Bernie and legendary lawman Bat Masterson—to identify the malicious figure. What they discover provides a surprise twist reminiscent of any O. Henry story. And yet, the blackmail plot isn’t nearly as interesting or suspenseful as other aspects of the story, including, for instance, the convoluted (and heartbreaking) circumstances that landed Porter in jail, and the reason he hardly said a word in his own defense. Yagoda paints an interesting portrait of a rapidly changing metropolis of 4 million rife with opportunity, especially for a writer. “Each of the four million is a person,” Porter tells an antiprostitution crusader, “with his own sadness, aspirations, occasional joy or triumph. I want to do right by them.”
Gotham might be a perilous place for most, but it’s the perfect spot for a writer in need of material.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781589882065
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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