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
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.
A dark fantasy set on the Yale campus ends with a bang.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern of Lethe House, one of Yale’s storied secret societies, has been to hell and back. That was in Hell Bent (2023), the middle book in Bardugo’s Ninth House trilogy, where the secret societies wield not just temporal power but magic as well. Hell Bent ended with Alex and her friends rescuing her crush, mentor, and fellow Lethe officer, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington V, from eternal torment. One small wrinkle: The demon Golgarot used Alex’s blood to wedge a door open between Hell and New Haven, and his minions are slipping through. Also, one of the group has turned into a vampire, and Darlington is now half demon. “He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul. He’d become both prisoner and warden.” As the final book opens, the exhausted crew are hunting yet another monster. They can’t keep this up forever; they will have to find a way to close the portal. Alex has the energetic, driven melancholy of the hard-boiled, dark fantasy heroine she is. She believes “magic is real, but safe is make-believe,” as her roommate puts it. An open hellmouth, a supportive scholar, a vampire whose story arcs precariously toward redemption, a gentleman fiend who gets literally horny when aroused, a California girl with rare supernatural powers who cracks wise as she fights fiends—the series has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn, but Bardugo’s way with words and her keen social observation keep the book from feeling derivative. A demon’s classic New England house is decorated with “ruthlessly inoffensive watercolor seascapes”; Lethe’s board president “wore the new uniform of Wall Street: a dress shirt, khakis, and a fleece with a Yale Y embroidered over the heart, as if he were on his way to a hostile takeover followed by some light rock climbing.” Will Alex and her friends get the door shut without losing Darlington? Bardugo injects her protagonist with such a convincing mix of cynicism and hope that failure seems like a distinct possibility.
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781250884312
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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