The X-Files meets William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist in the backwoods of Appalachia.
Doucette’s thriller follows an FBI agent haunted by a terrifying childhood trauma that threatens to destroy him—and countless innocents.
When FBI profiler Tom Milner was a child, he and his family moved from New York City to Betonville, Pennsylvania, a small town in the rural northwestern part of the state. One night, on a dare, the 5-year-old Milner and his best friend, Ben Potter, rode their bikes into the woods bordering the Allegheny National Forest—about a half-million acres of largely unexplored wilderness—where they were tasked by schoolmates with finding an old haunted cemetery under a bloodred moon. The spooky dare soon turned into a living nightmare; Milner thought he saw a giant, fur-covered creature crash through the darkness on the cliffs above him. The sound coming from the red-eyed thing was horrifying, and Milner and his friend barely escaped with their lives: “It was guttural and loud, like the enraged screams of a man mixed with the roar of a lion or a bear.” Decades later, working as one of the FBI’s most successful profilers (and struggling to stay afloat as a barely functioning alcoholic), Milner is called back to Betonville when a massive “boneyard” is discovered near the national forest. The site contains dozens of decomposed bodies whose deaths span over a century, and Milner knows instinctively that the carnage is somehow tied to the creature, who may or may not be a figment of his younger self’s imagination. With his old friend Ben (who’s now the Betonville sheriff) assisting him, Milner discovers a horrific truth: He is intimately connected to “Satan’s beast.” Doucette’s chilling novel is a darkly delectable offering sure to appeal to fans of police procedurals and supernatural thrillers. The blend of gritty crime fiction, local folklore, and paranormal fantasy is perfect, creating a storyline in which anything can happen. References to serial killers, satanic cults, bloody rituals, and even the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000 add complementary layers of bladder-loosening horror and tonally spot-on humor to the story.
The X-Files meets William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist in the backwoods of Appalachia.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2026
ISBN: 9798247669944
Page Count: 478
Publisher: Solstice Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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