A deliciously convoluted tale of layered deceptions.
Lowkis’ twisty debut plays with the conventions of the gothic novel in a tale that pits two ambitious sisters against each other.
In mid-19th century Paris, Sylvie and Charlotte Mothe have grown up practicing the art of fleecing their wealthy neighbors by pretending to be mediums. But when their compassionate mother dies, leaving them in the care of their alcoholic father, Sylvie, the elder sister, sets her sights on landing a rich husband, abandoning Charlotte in the process. When Charlotte approaches Sylvie with a proposal for a final con, this one involving a ghost supposedly haunting the dissolute de Jacquinot family, Sylvie resists at first but ultimately can’t resist using the skills she has developed, only to begin to wonder whether the ghost they are facing is more real than she suspected. Midway through the novel, Lowkis switches from Sylvie’s point of view to Charlotte’s and backtracks in time, bringing a surprising new perspective to the events that have transpired. A romantic attraction between Charlotte and the youngest member of the de Jacquinot family, the determined Florence, adds a spicy complication to the seances, which focus on the alleged appearance and ghostly actions of Florence’s departed great-aunt Sabine, who died during the Revolution. While the story drags a bit as it approaches the finish line, and a lurid ending changes its darkly comic tone, readers should enjoy the juicy details of post-Revolution Paris, the insider information on how to conduct a haunting, the echoes of Perrault’s fairy tales—including the one about a good sister and a bad one that gives the novel its title—and the complicated relationship between the two sisters, the details of whose history emerges along with that of their wealthier targets.
A deliciously convoluted tale of layered deceptions.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781668024959
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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