Some creepiness, some crime, and a charming protagonist.
A young North Carolina woman is set to inherit a fortune—but is it tied to a murder?
In Fulton’s second installment of a mystery series, Raleigh resident Beck Graham’s long-overdue visit to her grandmother comes too late. When Beck arrives at Cheyenne Graham’s Montana ranch, she finds Gran dead. There’s a bruise on Gran’s temple and a broken window, plus a “soft tuft of brown fur waves in the breeze, snagged on the glass.” When Police Chief Clay Munro arrives—“a fine specimen of manhood for sure”—and sees the body and bit of fur, he declares the death was due to Gran’s angering “The Bear.” What? The handyman boarding up Gran’s broken window chimes in: “Ain’t nobody make it once The Bear marks ’em.” Beck doesn’t buy the Bear talk; she thinks Gran was murdered. But Navy SEAL Eli Walker, a man Beck fantasizes about kissing—he has muscles in places she “didn’t know humans had”—doesn’t dismiss the legitimacy of the eerie Bear legend. Then Beck finds a note Gran wrote on the label of a bottle of essential oil that reads: “The Bear finally got me.” Beck loves oils, and she credits using them for her weight loss and for saving a dying horse that breathed in a mixture that included thyme and peppermint. Murder, men, and oils aside, Beck must decide if she’ll stay in Bear country as the heir apparent to Gran’s multimillion-dollar Three Forks Ranch. Along with the Bear theory, the story strains credulity with the facts of Beck’s inheritance. She stands to receive a fortune from a grandmother Beck hasn’t seen or heard from since the protagonist was a chubby 5-year-old. As an adult, Beck can be delightful; for example, when she meets Clay, she notes: “Those eyes run down my figure, and I tuck my tummy in a little tighter.” The book is part romance, part mystery, and part advertorial for essential oils. Two out of three are handled effectively; the oils content distracts from the other two. But oils are important to the author, who dedicates her novel to “all my ‘oily’ people.”
Some creepiness, some crime, and a charming protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-949711-78-3
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Bluewater Publications
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.
A dark fantasy set on the Yale campus ends with a bang.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern of Lethe House, one of Yale’s storied secret societies, has been to hell and back. That was in Hell Bent (2023), the middle book in Bardugo’s Ninth House trilogy, where the secret societies wield not just temporal power but magic as well. Hell Bent ended with Alex and her friends rescuing her crush, mentor, and fellow Lethe officer, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington V, from eternal torment. One small wrinkle: The demon Golgarot used Alex’s blood to wedge a door open between Hell and New Haven, and his minions are slipping through. Also, one of the group has turned into a vampire, and Darlington is now half demon. “He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul. He’d become both prisoner and warden.” As the final book opens, the exhausted crew are hunting yet another monster. They can’t keep this up forever; they will have to find a way to close the portal. Alex has the energetic, driven melancholy of the hard-boiled, dark fantasy heroine she is. She believes “magic is real, but safe is make-believe,” as her roommate puts it. An open hellmouth, a supportive scholar, a vampire whose story arcs precariously toward redemption, a gentleman fiend who gets literally horny when aroused, a California girl with rare supernatural powers who cracks wise as she fights fiends—the series has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn, but Bardugo’s way with words and her keen social observation keep the book from feeling derivative. A demon’s classic New England house is decorated with “ruthlessly inoffensive watercolor seascapes”; Lethe’s board president “wore the new uniform of Wall Street: a dress shirt, khakis, and a fleece with a Yale Y embroidered over the heart, as if he were on his way to a hostile takeover followed by some light rock climbing.” Will Alex and her friends get the door shut without losing Darlington? Bardugo injects her protagonist with such a convincing mix of cynicism and hope that failure seems like a distinct possibility.
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781250884312
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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