A touching love story.
A young woman finds love, faith, and freedom when she confronts the painful truth about her past in Bostrom’s novel.
Fisheries biologist Hildy Nybo grew up on her family’s fishing resort on the Elwha River near Olympic National Park in Washington state. She sometimes sees eerie “shadows” others can’t, and, doubting her own mind and memory, keeps detailed diaries and hoards strange keepsakes—stones, feathers, and yard-sale finds. Despite a successful scientific career, she lives like a hermit, with only a canary for company. When Hildy’s offered the dream job of lead project biologist with the ambitious Elwha River restoration project, she must return to the scene of past emotional traumas, including the disappearance of her beloved father when she was 14. Her unstable, hypercritical mother is falling into dementia, and the family business and property will be swept away forever in a couple of years when the Elwha Dam is demolished to allow salmon to return to their ancestral spawning grounds far upstream. Soon after returning home, she meets tall, handsome Luke, a former fisherman turned carpenter and farmer after the tragic deaths of his wife and young daughters on their boat. Luke is entranced by Hildy’s ethereal beauty and gentle spirit, and he patiently coaxes her out of her self-imposed isolation despite her many attempts to rebuff him. Navigating obstacles, sidetracks, misunderstandings, and shocking revelations, they slowly begin to trust in each other. Bostrom’s writing is vivid: Windshield wipers in a rainstorm “whapped like a terrier’s tail”; grieving Luke wears “suffering’s dark cloak.” The author deftly captures the way slight gestures can convey strong feelings and evokes the magnificence of the Olympic peninsula. As the four Bible verses cited before the book’s prologue suggest, Bostrom’s characters express a deeply held Christian faith. Though the trope of two damaged souls finding healing and romance in each other is nothing new, readers will find this version moving and satisfying.
A touching love story.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781496481573
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.
An author is targeted by a fan who just can’t let her go.
Arden Bowie has had plenty of tragedy in her life, but now she’s finally on top. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Ohio to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She soon became part of their loving family and grew up to become a writer and bookseller. When her debut novel is published, she meets Dustin Dubecki at her first event. He showers her with praise, asks for writing advice, and wants to take her out for coffee. Arden tells herself he’s just a little awkward, but then he keeps showing up at her local events—and, even stranger, she’s sure she sees him lurking at her event in New York City. When he bursts into her apartment one night and assaults her, Arden’s calm life is shattered. Dustin gets a five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility; Arden spends most of that time rebuilding her sense of stability. Eventually, she moves to Oregon to start a new life where Dustin can never find her. But even though she has a beautiful home, a thriving career, a doting family, new friends, and even a potential love interest in a former cop named Gideon Riley, Arden can’t escape Dustin’s rage when his sentence is finally up. Roberts toggles between Arden’s point of view and Dustin’s, giving the reader occasional glimpses into his extremely twisted mindset. Although Arden’s attempts to escape Dustin are engrossing, the story stalls in the middle when far too many pages are dedicated to Arden purchasing and decorating a house. But the excitement picks back up when Dustin, a truly odious villain, re-enters the story. It’s also satisfying to see Arden grow into someone who refuses to be a victim, even as she deals with horrifying circumstances.
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250413581
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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