Despite overdone soapboxing, vivid characters and hard-boiled writing make this an entertaining suspenser.
Murder is another dire effect of climate change in Guenette’s labyrinthine thriller.
This first installment of the author’s Steep Climes series envisions a near future in which catastrophic heat, droughts, and floods are fraying society, hobbling the economy, and nurturing deadly conspiracies. The novel opens with California climate activist Cyn Wainwright on her way to a meeting to persuade an investment group not to fund an oil pipeline. She witnesses her boss and lover, Joe, get shot to death by a man who looks like he’s wearing a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy uniform. Surmising that she was meant to be murdered as well, and fearing that all the cops are corrupt, Cyn flees east by Greyhound bus to Las Vegas, which is overshadowed by smoke from massive wildfires, and then to Chicago, which is suffering blackouts during a searing heat wave. She finally boards a Boston-bound train, where she is menaced by a squirrelly, gun-toting creep whom she dubs “Rat Face.” Cyn is rescued by attractive college graduate Jimmy Caine. Jimmy and Cyn take shelter with Jimmy’s dad, Davin, a digital-publishing consultant and wannabe sculptor living in a farmhouse in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where he spends much time bemoaning the rising cost of living stemming from climate change, including heavy rains that damaged his Airbnb unit. Omnipresent weather upheavals give Guenette’s yarn a haunting, apocalyptic air, but the long-winded discussions about climate change (“fossil fuel interests have far too long been pushing for delays, and then there’s the needlessly slow progress of some of the biggest renewable energy projects”) sometimes bog the narrative down. Fortunately, the novel’s thriller elements are first-rate, featuring deliciously unsavory lowlifes and intricate procedural details written in punchy prose. (“The client wants it to look like the target killed herself, so he’ll have to remove the silencer after he shoots her nice and up close, rub the end of the barrel on her shooting hand for the nitrates trace, leave the gun.”) Even global-warming deniers will enjoy the resulting page-turner.
Despite overdone soapboxing, vivid characters and hard-boiled writing make this an entertaining suspenser.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9798988505501
Page Count: 383
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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