A deeply intelligent and humorous examination of an anthropomorphized animal kingdom.
A retired lawyer who is murdered and reincarnated as a feral cat must find a way to bring his killers to justice in Stewart’s paranormal thriller.
After 35 years as a criminal defense attorney, William Hawkins retires to the small town of Crow River, hidden in the Canadian boondocks. After his wife Clare dies from cancer, William’s friendship with his neighbor Sandy deepens—she too is wrestling with cancer so painfully debilitating that she chooses to die by assisted suicide. However, before her procedure, she sees William brutally murdered and is then murdered herself, as she is the sole witness to the crime. Then, in a bizarre turn of events almost rendered plausible in this delightfully strange novel, William is reincarnated into a feral cat’s body. William (that’s a human name, so as a cat he either goes by Hawk or Buddy), desperate to solve his own murder, cutely charms his way into the home of his daughter, Jules, a police officer. She doesn’t know William is dead—his body has mysteriously vanished. He types out messages to her on his cell phone with his surprisingly nimble paws, both to get information about the investigation and send her some of his own when he comes upon it. The author constructs a remarkably complex animal world with its own moral code and laws, which William must navigate. It’s not entirely unlike the human one, except for the fact that the “animal world is always at war,” and so allowances must be made for the naturalness of predation. Such a fantastical tale can easily go off the rails into the absurdly contrived or the cloyingly saccharine—the protagonist is a kitten, after all—but Stewart manages to avoid both of these pitfalls. The result is a very funny and inventive novel that manages to achieve something rare: a glimmer of authentic originality.
A deeply intelligent and humorous examination of an anthropomorphized animal kingdom.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781069057907
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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