A dark, witty beach read about beach-town shenanigans.
Sisters in their 30s return to their Jersey Shore hometown, where they revisit lingering demons from their adolescence.
Although it’s really about the ways young women struggle to overcome unhealthy teenage relationships, McKeegan’s novel has the trappings of a beach-read mystery. On the first page of the first chapter, labeled "Beach Week 2022: Day Six," a dead body shows up; then the book jumps back to “Day One” and alternates between Beach Week 2022 and events at least 15 years earlier. Kimmy, a "finance superstar," arrives in Rocky Cape after a long absence. Her younger sister, Erin, has been living at home since her difficult divorce at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. As the week wears on, each sister relives painful memories of secrets and betrayals. The depiction of their love-hate relationship as kids is funny if painful, and McKeegan’s depiction of the sex, drugs, and general hedonism of teens during the early 2000s rings painfully true. Kimmy got in over her head and ended her senior year in deep trauma and humiliation. Now she reconnects with old friends, including her high school passion, Justin, who slept with her regularly back then though his official girlfriend was Erin’s nasty friend Madison. Despite Kimmy’s memory of Justin’s part in her ultimate humiliation, she can’t resist their mutual attraction during Beach Week. Erin had a secret teenage passion, too: Peter, an older college boy with whom she carried on a confusing flirtation, her devotion fueled by his mixed signals. After moving home two years ago, she fell into an affair with the married Peter. Now Peter is that dead body. Eventually the book moves past Day Six to follow the detective—a former classmate of Kimmy’s—who’s investigating whether Peter’s death was suicide or murder. There’s a fun twist at the end but McKeegan’s strength is bringing to life the intricate family and small-town social dynamics on display.
A dark, witty beach read about beach-town shenanigans.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305540
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
