A highly eventful but fast-paced supernatural thriller.
In Armstrong’s paranormal mystery, a young woman, haunted by a ghost, joins her adoptive family’s private investigation business and becomes entangled in a case involving child kidnapping and trafficking.
In Rubyville, Virginia, 21-year-old private eye Justyne Diamond “JD” Wolfe is no stranger to tragedy. After she lost her mother to a hotel room fire at age 8, a stringy-haired, lavender-smelling female ghost who was haunting her drug-abusing mom transferred to her. Events often descend into chaos when the spirit’s spectral presence is around. Also, JD believes that the ghost abandoned her early on, when the young girl was molested by a 16-year-old boy in St. Francis’ Group Home for Lost Souls. A few years later, a military family adopted JD; they owned an agency called White Wolfe Investigations. Now, as an adult, she’s determined to prove her worth as a PI—and as a member of the Wolfe family. But JD’s first job goes awry, and soon, straightforward surveillance missions lead to an investigation into murders and kidnappings connected to an international trafficking organization. The pace of Armstrong’s mystery is swift, but it effectively allows space for a number of emotional subplots: JD grows close to a local baseball hero’s unclaimed child and his large, loving Italian family, and she explores her relationships with her own painting talent and with a scarred bomb-disposal veteran. She also investigates possible infidelity between her father and his deceased best friend’s wife. JD’s voice often seems distractingly mature for her age at times, but the novel’s treatment of her insecurity rings true throughout. Some readers may find a few comments problematic; there are multiple comparisons of characters to Asian celebrities but no Asian characters in the novel, other than a villainous one. Delicate subjects and traumatic recollections involve child sexual assault, human trafficking, suicide bombing, and PTSD.
A highly eventful but fast-paced supernatural thriller.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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