A sophisticated but unsettling childhood mystery that appeals to both the head and heart.
A Canadian outdoorsman senses that he’s been reincarnated from an earlier age in this novel by Martin.
Martin (Taming Spirit, 2024) makes valiant attempts here to pull off a complex blend of historical fiction and psychological thriller. The novel begins in Alberta where Hartman Meyer, the oldest boy in a family of five, obsesses with exploring the lagoon that runs between his family’s farm and the neighbor’s property. When he travels the water, he looks for chert, a hard, opaque rock that the area’s first peoples used to make spearheads. He makes his own spears, but they can’t rival a genuine serrated spearhead that he finds—one that seems oddly familiar to him. In 1974, when Hartman turns 12, the wealthy Barrymore family moves in across from the Meyer farm. Like Hartman’s family, the Barrymore’s have three children, one of whom, Elizabeth, tickles Hartman’s fancy. But her older brother, Tyrone, is a bully. One day, while in a canoe in the lagoon, Tyrone slingshots lead balls at Hartman’s face and then paddles at full speed at him. Hartman holds his spear at the ready, and when the two boys connect, he drives it deep into Tyrone’s “soft belly” then pulls it out, and drops it into the lagoon. Hartman tells investigators it was the pole he used to push his raft that splintered and killed Tyrone by accident, but he knows it was murder, and he’s haunted by nightmares. Eventually, Elizabeth convinces him to go to a hypnotherapist to learn more about his nightmares, and then the book takes a dramatic shift back into the past. (Hartman’s therapist tells him he’s lived past lives.) Martin’s prose is elegant throughout and features well-developed characters and believable conversations. The author’s sense of humor also cuts through, such as when Hartman and his brother christen their watercraft “the Piss Cutter” and “relished the vulgarity that rolled off our tongues.” The descriptions of western Canada’s landscape will make readers want to pack their bags and head north. The therapy sections of the book also benefit from Martin’s many years as a psychotherapist.
A sophisticated but unsettling childhood mystery that appeals to both the head and heart.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798271562563
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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