Oil wells and passions explode in this entertaining murder tale.
A Colorado oil executive finds her business and her romantic life going up in flames in this thriller sequel.
Lean, long-haired Alex Sheridan, “a leader and maverick in the oil and gas business,” heads up Sheridan Enterprises, a Denver-based drilling company facing heated opposition at its Thompson Divide well site. Protesters are fighting to get a temporary restraining order to halt all drilling even though Alex has made sure her company complies with federal guidelines. Colt Forester, the well’s operator, sloughs off concern about the protests. “Working-man handsome” with “a Texas-sized smile,” he’s more interested—and successful—in grabbing Alex’s “perfect bottom” than in addressing her business problems. After making “ravenous love” in her office, they fight “like tomcats” and he storms out. Colt goes AWOL from his job at the oil well just as a raging fire breaks out at the site. Angus “Bull” Hawthorn, head of Wild Well Operations, a company specializing in extinguishing fires, meets Alex at the burning well. Also at the site is Colt’s abandoned truck. Police at the scene find a charred body, believed to be Colt’s. The discovery of a bullet wound in the crisped corpse makes suspicion fall to Alex, the multimillion-dollar beneficiary of her lover’s life insurance policy. Less excess would make Jeffett’s tale more believable. For example, it’s one thing for Alex to have an expansive office, but it’s another to have that space connect to “an elaborate dressing room that housed every conceivable necessity, from makeup to athletic gear to guns.” Repetition is also a problem; a second passage extolls Alex’s dressing area as having “every item imaginable” before listing many of those things. Key words and phrases are also overused in descriptions, sculpted body being one of them: Alex’s T-shirt reveals a “sculpted body”; Colt’s “sculpted body” intoxicates Alex; and Bull stretches his “sculpted body.” Nitpicking aside, it’s refreshing to read about a woman who succeeds in the boardroom as much as she does in the bedroom in this engaging story with a strong protagonist. According to a friendly adversary, “Alex Sheridan knew more about putting an oil deal together than most. In the industry, her word was gold, a rare and admirable quality.”
Oil wells and passions explode in this entertaining murder tale.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-94-803565-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Defiance Press & Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2021
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
