This prequel offers entertainment for fans, but killer Joe Goldberg might have overstayed his welcome.
What makes a serial killer a serial killer? Here’s the rom-com version.
This is Kepnes’ fifth novel about murderer, hopeless romantic, and colossally unreliable narrator Joe Goldberg, but it’s the first prequel, recounting Joe’s experiences as a 17-year-old in New York City not long after 9/11. Even at that tender age he sees books and sex as inextricably linked—he calls his penis “Portnoy.” Like the other books (which became a five-season Netflix series), this one takes us inside Joe’s head, where he addresses a running commentary to a “you” that’s not the reader but a woman he’s fallen madly in love with, which in Joe’s case means he’s stalking her. This time it’s Vail Gunderson, a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl with the most early-2000s job ever: She’s a production assistant on Sex and the City. She’s obsessed with the show and with rom-coms in general, and Joe, who practices obsession as an art, follows right along. Their relationship plays out amid a cast of sometimes wacky, sometimes disturbing characters, including Mr. Mooney, the bookstore owner who employs Joe and occasionally locks him in the basement; Angus Kaplan, a wealthy Mooney client and frustrated writer who buys pricey signed volumes by authors he envies and then desecrates them, often with Joe as an audience; and the aptly named Dick, a barista friend of Vail’s who offers Joe lots of bro-style advice. Kepnes’ trademark dark humor peppers the book, and there are some surprising twists. But the true twisted charm of the earlier installments was Joe’s unrestrained interior monologue. This time around it too often falls flat; maybe it’s because young Joe seems not quite as ferocious as the fully formed version, or maybe it’s that we’ve entered an era when narcissistic, amoral rambling seems overdone.
This prequel offers entertainment for fans, but killer Joe Goldberg might have overstayed his welcome.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9780399591464
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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