A devious, if occasionally melodramatic, psychological thriller.
A disturbed man searches for his missing girlfriend in Baker’s Jekyll-and-Hyde–inspired debut crime novel.
Peter Longer, the son of an abusive preacher, has another personality inside him—one he calls Jason, who tells him to do bad things—and he believes the alter ego to be a result of a family curse. The 49-year-old man also believes that he’ll die at 50, the same age that his father did; a spirit woman known as the Wren, he thinks, will come to punish him for the things he’s done. He was committed to a state institution as a teenager after killing a woman, but he managed to escape and was accepted, under a false name, to Columbia University. Later, he pursued a series of blue-collar jobs out West. Eventually, in Colorado, he strolled into a church on a snowy morning, looking for warmth, and met Sarah Montrose, a friendly young woman with a trust fund. The two fell in love and Peter found himself with a luxury apartment, a job polishing resumes, and a good woman in his life. He was convinced, in fact, that Sarah cured him of his family curse. Then, after two years of happiness, Sarah disappeared in 2016. The cops got involved, but the case quickly went cold, leaving only Peter and Richard Redd, a lone Denver police detective, committed to finding her two years later: “I continued to search for Sarah,” Peter narrates. “For without her, I was doomed. She had protected me from the cruelty, the savagery the bloodline bred into the men who carried the seed.” When Redd comes across a name related to a different murder—someone named Jason Bane—it becomes clear that the story that Peter has been telling himself may not be as straightforward as it seems.
Baker’s prose is taut and plainspoken, with shades of dirty realism that go along with the novel’s general sense of psychological unease. Here, for example, Peter stops at a drug store to tend some wounds before going to meet a single mother whom he thinks might be a suitable replacement for Sarah: “In the rearview mirror, I saw my lip had broken open again….I stopped for gauze, antiseptics, and Band-Aids. A fuzzy pink bunny sat on display at the checkout counter. Perfect for the first gift to a little girl who I hoped would grow to adore me.” The novel is mostly narrated from Peter’s perspective, although the introduction of Redd offers some much-needed respite from the protagonist’s unsettling point of view. The book has a sensationalized view of violence, rural poverty, and mental illness, and readers will be likely to spot the plot’s big twist from miles away. Even so, the mystery that unfolds over the course of the novel is somewhat more nuanced than it initially appears, resulting in a reading experience that’s chock full of reversals and complications. The faint of heart should probably stay away, but fans of dark, cerebral horror tales will likely enjoy unraveling this one.
A devious, if occasionally melodramatic, psychological thriller.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73412-982-3
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Horsetooth Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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