An edgy, engaging tale brimming with perils and a romance worth rooting for.
A woman yearns for a quiet life in North Carolina, but both love and her dangerous past find her in this thriller.
Months after her husband’s death, Finley Thompson and her kids move to the small town of Davidson. She’s hiding from her ex-boyfriend—due for release after 20 years in a mental institution for her parents’ murders. But keeping a low profile isn’t so easy. Simply helping her new neighbor, who’s fallen off his horse, involves hiding the gun and drugs in his house before anyone shows up. That’s just the kind of attention she doesn’t need. But the neighbor, CJ Sinclair, is a green-eyed, handsomely chiseled man, and the attraction is mutual. While Finley is understandably reluctant to reveal anything about her past, CJ has copious secrets of his own. He knew her husband from their military days and suspects that his fatal car crash wasn’t very accidental. Finley and CJ’s relationship gets off to a rocky start since they are both concealing something. They’ll nevertheless need to help each other when a menace slowly creeps into town. Though romance takes the spotlight in this novel, May builds a suspenseful tale. For example, a surprise phone call from Finley’s ex means he may know exactly where she is, and CJ later spies someone following her. Davidson is rife with obstacles for the burgeoning couple, from the local cop who blatantly hates CJ to the veteran’s cheating ex-wife. But Finley’s and CJ’s self-made barriers generate the most melodrama, as they struggle with their thorny histories. At the same time, their romantic musings are sometimes repetitive, endlessly admiring each other’s eyes, smiles, and kissable lips. Still, this absorbing relationship does evolve as the enjoyable story moves along, dishing out such tense plot turns as an encrypted flash drive and a freezing November thunderstorm.
An edgy, engaging tale brimming with perils and a romance worth rooting for.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 434
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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