A busy but spooky and gripping horror tale.
Some renovators discover that they’re rehabbing a haunted house in this novel.
Laura MacKenzie sees the restoration of the old MacKenzie place—the run-down mansion in rural Wisconsin that her husband, Lucas, and his brother, Nate, recently inherited—as a good project to keep her busy. She hopes the enterprise will distract her from the grief she still feels following the death of her adult son, Jacob, a year ago. Lucas, too, is looking at it as a simple renovation job, but Nate has hired a film crew to document the work in hopes of selling it as an HGTV special. Until the house is done, Laura and Lucas are living in a trailer with Jacob’s only child: their 2-year-old granddaughter, Leah. As the repairs begin, the mansion reveals itself to be more than it initially appeared: a place of hidden passageways, secret histories, and unexplainable phenomena. Local rumor says that it’s haunted, and Laura soon begins to suspect that something indeed might be going on, particularly when an immortal wizard named Kenric Shepherd arrives to investigate a book written in Old English that Lucas finds on the property. It turns out this may not be the best house for Laura to hide away from her tragedies. In fact, she may be lucky just to make it out alive. In this horror series opener, Lloyd’s prose is attuned to the rhythms of both her characters and the house, maximizing the suspense: Nate “climbed the ladder onto the roof with agile grace, no fear of the height, a thirty-foot drop from the eaves. On the deck, he stepped carefully. The shingles were dry, but the accumulated leaves were wet and slick, ready to send the careless skittering off the roof to a hard landing below with a single misstep.” Laura is a compelling protagonist, and the dynamic between the two couples—Nate’s wife, Ashley, is also working on the mansion—provides a fun source of tension. There is perhaps one element too many (it might be the wizard) and readers may disagree on how warranted a sequel is, but as a stand-alone haunted house story, the novel manages to satisfy.
A busy but spooky and gripping horror tale.Pub Date: July 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-57-866497-2
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Land of Oz
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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