An unexpected ending and a cadre of heroic female characters make Jean a crime writer to watch.
A detective suspects subterfuge when a kidnapped teen returns home after two years and refuses to talk about her abductor.
Missing girls are a common trope in crime fiction, but Jean freshens the genre with an intriguing story about secrets and dysfunctional families. Ellie Black, emaciated and traumatized, is found in a Washington state forest two years after she was taken from a parking lot near her hometown. Who took her and how she escaped confound police detective Chelsey Calhoun because Ellie is evading her questions. The case is an emotional investment for the haunted Chelsey, whose teenage sister Lydia went missing 15 years before. Jean’s novel is told from multiple perspectives, which gives her story emotional heft. The time readers spend with Ellie during her captivity is told with such devastating detail that it borders on a horror story. The toll her disappearance takes on her parents and high school boyfriend is acutely painted with heartbreak and the anguish that comes with not knowing whether Ellie is alive. Chelsey, who is of Japanese heritage, carries a double load of challenges as she fends off sexism and racism on the job and in her community. She’s an intriguing character; more details about her early life and adoption into a white family would have enriched her backstory. Like Jessica Knoll, whose crime novels also revolve around missing girls, Jean focuses less on sensationalizing predators and more on the tragedy of a “frenzy of missing girls. They do not give answers. They do not speak of what has come to pass. They whisper: Find us. Please.” Jean, who has written young adult fiction and the novel Mika in Real Life (2022), has written an impressive crime novel here.
An unexpected ending and a cadre of heroic female characters make Jean a crime writer to watch.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668023938
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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