This thriller has all the right elements but needs tightening.
In Royce’s thriller, a woman’s buried trauma and secrets resurface after she receives a letter from a stranger.
The novel opens on the Halloween of 1998 following a house party. Sixteen-year-old Ingrid Lind seeks medical treatment after a brutal sexual assault leaves her with several injuries, including a broken nose, leading to a procedure that becomes her entry point into cosmetic surgery and an eventual complete reinvention (“a key that would unlock a series of useful doors”). Fast forward to 2018: The 36-year-old Ingrid, now called Viveca Stephenson, is a former LA actress living a life of affluence in the Connecticut suburb of Greenwich with her successful husband, Henry, and young son, Theo. The timeline alternates between her childhood years in rural Michigan and the present while tracing the events that occurred in-between as she constructed a new identity after her life-altering trauma. Across these timelines, Ingrid’s flashbacks contain fragments of memories that cast her life into question and expose the fragility of her secret identity—including those of the seemingly picture-perfect family she felt adopted into, the fractures within her own family unit, and her journey to a new life protected by a new voice, face, name, and life story. Severe chronic migraines still plague her (“Sometimes—not always—Ingrid would pass out and be left with blanks. Windows of time in which she’d suffered excruciating pain that she simply could not recall”), but it appears that she is finally in the clear in her new life. Even the “tainted” memories of that fateful Halloween have receded into the background, replaced by happy recollections of her son’s birthday. Then, a terrifying home invasion is followed by a letter from a man who knows her and her secret. She doesn’t know who he is. Are the events interconnected? The mystery quickly sends the narrative into psychological-thriller territory.
The contrast between the protagonist’s inner and outer lives is absolutely compelling, and the flashbacks offer multiple layers, creating a mystery within the mystery. The story’s red herrings are well thought out and fresh, and the elements demonstrating how Viveca’s past shapes her present become enticing, plot-driven easter eggs of their own. The story will please fans of authors like Liane Moriarty and Ruth Ware, but the execution doesn’t quite match the intriguing premise. The prose reads as awkward at times, with the word “remembered” making an appearance five times on a single page during a flashback. (Long sequences of flashbacks require immediacy, and the author’s passive language can create awkward clumps.) At one point, the word you jarringly closes the distance between the third-person narrator and the reader (“All you had to do was look around you”), disrupting the flow of the chapter’s exposition. These problems are exacerbated by a larger sentence-by-sentence issue—the story is weighed down by flattened descriptions (“It had a sealed-off feeling”) and filler dialogue that seems meant to mirror real-life speech but only dilutes the narrative’s tension and rhythm. These missteps hamper an otherwise engaging, atmospherically rich mystery.
This thriller has all the right elements but needs tightening.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9798895653340
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.
A violent attack hijacks a woman’s memory in this novel of domestic suspense.
McFadden wastes no time pulling the trigger in this harrowing story that starts with gunfire then swiftly propels readers into a crack tale of secrets and misdirection. Originally self-published in 2016, the book carries the same formidable weight as McFadden’s later novels featuring unsuspecting women who lose their power then fight to recapture it—mostly from men who have betrayed them. That formula perfectly fits Dr. Charlotte McKenna, a 37-year-old dermatologist who isn’t looking for love until the most handsome man she’s ever seen begins to woo her. There are warning signs about Clark Douglas and Charlotte overlooks them to her detriment—but is he a killer? The novel has dual timelines split between events leading up to the day Charlotte barely survives a head wound meant to kill her and the months afterward, when she struggles to reclaim her memory and her mobility. In real life, McFadden is a physician trained to treat brain injuries. Her expertise gives Charlotte’s rehabilitation authenticity, and her writing talent makes it interesting and engaging. As good as that timeline is, readers will yearn to get back to the alternate timeline about who wants Charlotte dead. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte starts to remember who tried to kill her, and the clock is ticking toward their next attempt. McFadden dishes up plenty of suspects: Charlotte’s secretive husband, Clark; a former patient turned stalker who confronts Charlotte on her honeymoon; and the angry husband of a patient who blames Charlotte for his wife leaving him. Though the story is delicious and dark, McFadden brightens things up with a possible love interest for Charlotte and a surprise ending sure to please the author’s many fans.
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249617
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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