A richly atmospheric, character-driven wilderness thriller.
A disparate group of people encounter unexpected peril in the mountains in this historical novel.
Duffy, the author of The Artichoke Queen (2015), opens his new story in 1946. Francine Lilley is a divorced woman who’s made a long, tedious train voyage from New York City to tiny Braxton, Wyoming, where she’s bought a run-down dude ranch, The Flying U, and intends to reinvent her life by making a go of the place. Also intent on remaking her life is Jessica Quick, who’s come to live with her sister after enduring a broken love affair and a miscarriage, both of which have driven her into a destructive pattern of heavy drinking. Jessica takes a job as cook and general helper at The Flying U, working for the boss of the place, Ed McCann, and hoping someday to be allowed to lead a group of hunters and tourists on a trek into the backcountry around Cutthroat Lake. The novel’s opening third depicts Francine and Jessica’s slow acclimation process and introduces various complications; for example, a group of high-spirited New York friends come to visit Francine and see the Wild West, and a young war veteran named Sonny Trace introduces himself to both Jessica and Francine, the latter of whom thinks that he looks like a gunslinger, “even if the only gunslinger she’d ever seen was in a Hollywood film.” When Ed leads an expedition to the lake that encounters an aggressive grizzly bear, things take a tragic turn.
Duffy’s storytelling is deceptively laconic; by the time Ed’s expedition sets out, readers will be fully invested in the major characters and their various, clashing worlds. The dramatic addition of an almost supernaturally malevolent bear to the proceedings just makes the overall story more compelling. The author makes a wise narrative choice to pull the reader out of the company’s immediate peril and instead focus on Jessica and Sonny as they track them and grow increasingly worried; the suspense is skillfully handled and refreshingly melded with the growing personal attraction between the two latter characters. Duffy adopts a pleasing, quasi-folkloric tone in some of his narration, which fits well with the wild setting; at one point, for example, he stoically writes about a past bear-attack victim: “It had been so cold the man had barely bled, and by the time his fellow hunters got to him, they found him sitting on a log singing a trail song, his bloody exposed teeth whistling in the breeze.” The author carefully manages the pacing in the book’s second half, although some readers may balk at the behavior of the monster grizzly, which sometimes seems more like the shark in Peter Benchley’s Jaws than anything that hikers are likely to encounter in real life. Nonetheless, the human characters are well drawn throughout, and the tension of the climax is so adroitly handled that readers won’t be able to put the book down. Fans of C.J. Box’s and Paul Doiron’s work will likely find this book appealing.
A richly atmospheric, character-driven wilderness thriller.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60489-236-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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