A fun throwback horror tale that will keep readers on edge.
In this horror mystery, an unlikely group of detectives investigates the evil forces at work in a small town.
Donovan Graves is a parapsychology professor in Chicago with a well-earned skepticism of the paranormal, caught between a desire to debunk those he sees as fraudsters and a sincere yearning to know what waits on the other side of death. His work is fueled in part by his own grief over the loss of his son, David, who died in childhood. Now—in a moment when paranormal activity is on the rise across the world—Donovan feels for the first time that David is trying to contact him. A message appears in front of his son’s grave: “FIND HER.” Meanwhile, in Williston, North Dakota, high school senior Rachel Black is having her own problems with a ghost: recurrent dreams filled with screaming wake her in the middle of the night. Rachel knows who the screams belong to. Nearly a year ago on Halloween, a woman named Annabel Heller was murdered by her husband. Rachel isn’t the only one experiencing the supernatural. Jason Hardy has just arrived in Williston to perform an audit of the local hospital. Stationed in the old building while nearly all other personnel have moved to the new one, Jason begins to hear and see strange things. Chicago medium Madam Helen Bovell isn’t exactly on the up and up. She lost her psychic gift years ago, and ever since she’s been forced to scam her customers. But for some reason, her ability has recently come back—and tells her inexplicably to locate Rachel Black. As these four figures assemble in the remote town of Williston—“a place of drifting roughnecks and dirty riches beneath windy, barren plains”—a mystery involving restless forces demands to be solved. But just how dark can the mystery get? The seekers have less than a week to find out since Halloween is just around the corner.
Devore’s prose deftly vacillates between the concrete and the phantasmagoric: “Rachel drifted in and out of sleep. Her muscles were relaxed, and her body felt as if floating into a dream. Someone called her name, but the voice came from the dreamscape. The real world had fallen away, ceding its authority to the infinite realm of the mind.” The book unfolds slowly, the tension rising with every chapter, drawing its characters closer together while spiking the stakes. The small-town North Dakota setting, which is painted in even bleaker terms than readers might already imagine, is a perfect spot for this sort of ticking-clock ghost story. The novel evokes the spirit of 1980s horror paperbacks, both in its prodigious length (over 550 pages) and its unapologetic drift into classic—and sometimes campy—territories of the genre. The less said about the twists the better, but the author will keep readers engrossed all the way through. The ending, while perhaps a bit neat, satisfies well enough. An experienced writer of thrillers, Devore has made a successful sally into spookier realms.
A fun throwback horror tale that will keep readers on edge.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9852413-8-4
Page Count: 562
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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