A heartburning family tell-all just in time to gladden your Thanksgiving. Yes, your own relatives could be worse.
In Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, the collapse of a wealthy financier at a charity gala to honor his incapacitated wife throws his adult children for a loop. And the loops are only beginning.
Impoverished poet/playwright Lucinda Fox’s behind-the-scenes make-out session with Aja (“Asia, like the continent”), a waitress she’s just met, ends up as kissus interruptus when the curtain is raised to disclose the pair to a bevy of scandalized charity supporters that include Lucinda’s father, Stefan Fox, who instantly clutches his heart and collapses. When his thoroughly dysfunctional family gathers in the hospital, they learn that he’s suffered both a heart attack and a stroke; later, Det. Lucas Kapinos, whose high school romance with Lucinda’s older sister, Valerie, was nipped in the bud by her father, informs them that he’s been poisoned as well. As the patriarch hovers between life and death, family attorney Corbin Piedmont tells Lucinda, Valerie, and their brothers that Stefan's plan to divide his estate among his children has been complicated by his creation of the Den, a secret family trust fund where he’s squirreled away $5 million. No sooner has Christian Fox, his father’s favorite son and heir apparent to Fox Wealth Management, announced his intention to challenge the trust than he’s killed in a suspicious car crash. Who’ll be next—his chronically unsuccessful brother, Jeremy, one of his sisters, or a corpse from out of left field? Reinard juggles suspects, motives, and family skeletons with such dexterity that it’s hard to imagine any of the Fox clan actually being innocent.
A heartburning family tell-all just in time to gladden your Thanksgiving. Yes, your own relatives could be worse.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3976-5
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
This mystery’s foremost puzzle? The human heart.
A Los Angeles–based podcaster is AWOL in Crum’s debut, a thriller-romance mashup.
Joy Moore, one half of the chart-topping “comedy survival podcast” This Story Might Save Your Life, is acting strange. She privately tells her co-podcaster and best friend, Benny Abbott, that she wants to take a break from podcasting and will explain why later. The next day, when Benny arrives to record at the home Joy shares with her husband, Xander, who handles podcast business, the couple isn’t there and the house appears vandalized. Benny phones Joy and Xander, but they don’t pick up. He summons the cops and reminds them that Joy is being stalked by someone who “claims to be our biggest fan” and demonstrates this by secretly snapping her picture and posting the images on social media. When it comes to Joy’s stalker, the police have been useless—“They say it doesn’t fit the definition of harassment or something,” Benny grouses—so what’s a podcaster to do but ask his listeners for help? Crum has a smart solution to the problem of how to maintain the mystery of Joy’s whereabouts without sacrificing the character’s viewpoint: The novel’s first half largely alternates between Benny’s present-day narration and Joy-authored chapters pulled from the memoir she and Benny are cowriting. This way, the novel’s readers hear from both parties on the matter consuming Joy’s and Benny’s listeners: As Joy puts it, “Everyone, literally everyone, asks if we were ever romantically involved.” The novel’s did-they-or-didn’t-they/will-they-or-won’t-they tease goes down like a fizzy drink until the story takes a surprising turn at the midpoint. Here the plot sheds much of its mystery and a bit of its allure, although by book’s end, Crum has reconstituted that initial sizzle.
This mystery’s foremost puzzle? The human heart.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781250395238
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pine & Cedar/Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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