Baleful dispatches from the spirit world. They’re watching, they’re powerful, and they’re not happy.
Australian horrormeister Coates revives and revises the title novella, her very first ghostly tale, adding another long story and seven shorter shivers.
Beware of Polaroid cameras you find while circling more and more widely around your buddy’s wedding reception. Jenine imprudently starts snapping pictures of the wedding party and soon notices spectral presences in the background. Her best friend, Breanna, who owns a flower shop, encourages her to get in touch with respected ghost researcher Richard Holt, whose advice is terse: crush and burn that camera posthaste. By this time, Jenine has already snapped more pictures that reveal more ghosts; in a follow-up consultation with Holt, she learns that he had tried to help two other people who found ghost cameras that snapped photos breaching the boundary between the living and the dead, exposing them to deadly peril, which makes Jenine and Bree fear that it’s too late for them, too. In the other long story, “A Box of Tapes,” concerned mother Tess finds a sealed box of VHS tapes inexplicably nestled in the closet of her 4-year-old daughter, Kayla. “DON’T WATCH. YOU’LL REGRET IT,” advises an attached note, but Tess, like Jenine, ignores this advice, and the consequences are equally dire. The briefer stories are more invested in laying out a menacing premise than in developing a sustained plot from it. The most notable of them are “Untamed Things,” in which the only two survivors of an airline crash lean into each other in the hope of attracting possible rescuers, and “Cathedral,” which moves directly from a leisurely opening to a whiplash punchline.
Baleful dispatches from the spirit world. They’re watching, they’re powerful, and they’re not happy.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781728278964
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Another entertaining Aussie cozy for readers of Liane Moriarty—and fans of tough old ladies everywhere.
When her tabloid past comes back to haunt her, an 81-year-old Australian woman gets by with a little help from her friends.
When the neighbor child asks to interview her for a school project, Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick’s first line of defense is to shift little Persephone’s focus to another “old person” in their suburban Melbourne neighborhood, 93-year-old Ishaan Patel. Too late, says Persephone, he’s dead. This surprising information turns out to be true, as when she goes to check, Elsie finds the man sprawled lifeless on his kitchen floor. Her discovery of the body proves to be the first domino in a cascade of unwanted events, as her long-buried identity as Mad Mabel, the youngest convicted killer in Australian history, comes to light and creates a tidal wave of suspicion and media attention. Hepworth’s latest cozy domestic thriller uses the device of a YouTube documentary team determined to get Elsie/Mabel’s side of the story on the record for the first time, presented here in chapters alternating between Now and Then. In the present, cantankerous, sharp-tongued loner Elsie goes from having just one friend, the loyal Daphne Barton, to a web of close connections, including even a previously reviled dog she reluctantly inherits from the late Ishaan. In the past, a landslide of dead bodies and cruel twists of fate emerges to both justify and challenge the Mad Mabel moniker. If some aspects of the premise feel overfamiliar (cranky oldster’s frozen heart thawed by charming child), other elements are less well worn—a lovely pair of lesbians named Cess and Ness in the Then thread, for example. Those quirky suburban Australian neighborhoods just keep popping out the predators, bullies, shocking family secrets, and darkly charming surprises.
Another entertaining Aussie cozy for readers of Liane Moriarty—and fans of tough old ladies everywhere.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781250284549
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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