While maternal regret may not be the taboo subject Freitas claims, book clubs should love her satisfying page-turner.
Freitas—whose previous novel focused on one woman’s decision whether to have a child—offers the intertwining stories of several young Rhode Island mothers who experience various combinations of satisfaction and regret over their choices.
What sets this entry into the genre of motherhood fiction apart is that Freitas has created an engrossing mystery: Was successful real estate agent Lucy Mendoza kidnapped in the parking lot of a Narragansett Beach supermarket or did she abandon her baby, Emma, there? Freitas plants hints pointing in a lot of directions, most of them red herrings, leading toward twisty solutions to not one but several disappearances. At the same time, the novel lays out Freitas’ thesis about unfair attitudes toward women as mothers almost too neatly through other mothers’ reactions. Diana Gonzalez, a retired detective consulting on the case, notices parallels between Lucy’s case and those of two other women, Maeve O’Neil and Joanna D’Angelo. Years ago, Maeve returned eight days after having vanished, only to drown with her child a year later. Joanna has been missing for the last three years but has received little attention thanks to her unsympathetic profile—she was having an affair, among other things. Meanwhile, Lucy’s best friend, Michelle Carvalho, faces a moral and emotional crisis. A devoted mother, Michelle doesn’t want to believe Lucy would forsake Emma. She puts off telling the police that Lucy confided her wish that she’d never had a baby. When Michelle’s husband goes behind her back and tells the press, the public assumes Lucy is a bad mother who ran off. But not graphic artist Julia Gallo, who empathizes with Lucy. Julia loves her baby but hates being a mother. Joining the support group to which Lucy belonged, Julia finds guidance and a solution Freitas seems to like, although it would probably be deemed unacceptable for a male character. (Even decent husbands get short shrift here.) Freitas, who has been public about choosing not to have children, works hard to capture ambivalences in motherhood and marriage.
While maternal regret may not be the taboo subject Freitas claims, book clubs should love her satisfying page-turner.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781641296380
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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