A juicy mystery filled with gossip—and music you can almost hear.
While a singer-songwriter is striving to produce an authentic-sounding album, her best friend from high school is found at the bottom of a lake—dredging up the tragedy behind the music.
Dylan Read is a mega-selling, Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter whose country roots have evolved into a sort of “bedroom pop” that fans love for its personal and—although she doesn’t like the word—confessional nature. But despite her best efforts, the media accuse her of being fake. In a news article about the cold case of a girl who went missing 15 years ago, the headline gives the detail that Kelsey Copestenke was a classmate of Dylan’s, seemingly milking the flimsy connection between the two for the sake of getting more page views. But what Dylan hasn’t told the press—or even her publicist—is that she owes her career to Kelsey. Beneath the veneer of her success are the people who know Dylan’s secrets: the high school classmates; Kelsey’s brother, Matt; and the boyfriend she hides from the world for fear it’ll wreck their relationship and her career. But one secret is a mystery: what happened to Kelsey. As Dylan goes through each album of her catalog, she flashes back to her high school years in upstate New York with her lost friend, who was forming a musical duo with Dylan when she went missing. “Country music is about relatability,” Dylan says. “Just three chords and the truth, as the saying goes. Pop, on the other hand, traffics in fantasy.” In the story, there’s a balance of both. The flashbacks are entertaining and filled with cringey high school drama. On the less relatable end, Dylan still frets about what the press says about her. But what makes her most interesting is Layden’s respect for the craft of making music, from Dylan’s “fear that tortilla chips might scratch my vocal cords” to Kelsey’s early guitar lessons: “We’re gonna learn four chords and six strumming patterns and you’re gonna have to trust me when I tell you that’s all you need to know.”
A juicy mystery filled with gossip—and music you can almost hear.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780063315099
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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