An astonishingly accomplished debut that brings a past full of intrigue and ardor to life on the page.
A secret romance between two noblewomen in 1680s Paris is threatened by the Affair of the Poisons in this bewitching work of historical fiction.
Marie Catherine la Jumelle, Baronne de Cardonnoy, lives a life of prosperous repression. Married to a mercurial and ambitious husband she cannot love, she finds solace in her two children, the opportunities to spin fairy tales at women’s salons, and the affections of Victoire de Conti, an impetuous, androgynous Princess of the Blood. Their love affair thrives despite the ever looming threat of discovery, until a misunderstanding with a portrait painter, paranoia sweeping the city in the wake of several high-profile poisonings, and an unexpected act of violence combine to endanger the secret life the two have built. Murder plots, assignations, investigations, and court machinations all follow and drive the novel to its nerve-wracking and moving conclusion. Bell elegantly balances the passion of a romance with the tension of crime fiction, all while conjuring a Paris rich in sensuous detail. From the first page, she situates the reader in a very specific moment in time without overloading the prose with self-congratulatory evidence of her own research. Marie Catherine and Victoire’s alienation from heterosexual society and longing to find others like themselves cannot help but resonate with contemporary queer readers, but Bell deftly avoids ascribing modern identities to them and allows them to be women of their own time. With similar precision, Bell uses her extensive cast of characters, whose various points of view the reader glimpses through shifting third-person limited narration, to explore class tensions. Poor women and rich women may come up against different limitations and employ contrasting methods of self-reinvention, but all of them are hungry for freedom—watching them strive for it is utterly captivating.
An astonishingly accomplished debut that brings a past full of intrigue and ardor to life on the page.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780593317174
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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