Readers won’t soon forget this dark little novel.
Milnes’ novel follows a disillusioned 69-year-old art afficionado who embarks on a quest to push back against a cultural “tide of trash.”
The creepy, nameless narrator is a failed actor of surpassing paleness (he was “Ghoul 14” in the 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man) and a former band promoter who once worked on Barry Manilow’s U.K. tours. Now, living in Spain with a detestably superficial woman who considers herself an artist—she paints what he describes as “kitsch rubbish”—something inside the man (who deeply loves art and its connection to culture and history) snaps. Armed with a rifle, he sets off on a mission to rid the world of “trasheteers,” those he sees as villains forcing trash culture down upon him. His first victims are a group of graffiti artists who have defiled iconic locations all over Europe that have been featured in famous paintings. (“In Spain you were in the landscapes of Goya, Bustillo Salomón, Velasquez, in France you were in the landscapes of Lorraine, Monet, Cezanne, Lavieille.”) After that, he targets more well-known artists, like the now 81-year-old Manilow, who is in London on a tour, and novelist Bernadine Evaristo, the president of the Royal Society of Literature, to name a few. Equal parts unhinged manifesto, thinly veiled social commentary, and serial killer’s meandering travelogue through Europe, this circular narrative is decidedly disturbing—particularly with real figures like Evaristo and others being targeted for death. (Readers will never experience a Barry Manilow song in quite the same way again.) But it’s the depth of depraved character development that truly powers this twisted tale. The narrator’s skewed view of the world, as seen through the lens of his frustration and anger, is, unsettlingly, almost understandable, especially considering his many failures, both personal and professional, throughout his largely unfulfilled life.
Readers won’t soon forget this dark little novel.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781916183216
Page Count: 210
Publisher: whattradition books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
© 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.
