An ambitious read that’s well suited for readers fascinated by newsroom politics, regional nostalgia, and stories of the...
In Cervarich’s 1970s-set mystery, a private detective investigates the murder of a promising young woman.
San Francisco private eye and occasional film industry worker Charlie Foxhawk Carter is drawn into a tangled web of deceit when he’s hired to investigate the mysterious death of Lacy Stevens, an ambitious young news producer. Lacy had recently left her job at KGO-TV to join rival station KPIX-TV (“It’s the big leagues in a major market, total contrast to the Podunk station I worked for in Petersburg, Virginia for six months”), largely due to her affair with the station’s director, Bernie Neufsinger, whose once-promising career is spiraling out of control due to his cocaine and heroin addiction. Complicating matters, a KGO employee, Bruce Dune, has developed a dangerous obsession with Lacy, stalking her and fixating on her every move. Meanwhile, Bernie’s wife, Carla, has fallen under the influence of a self-styled spiritual guru who happens to be the subject of a documentary that Lacy had been researching before her demise. KPIX hires Charlie to investigate Lacy’s death to get ahead of any possible fallout. He soon finds himself teaming up with her colleague and friend, Hector Torres, and their search takes them into the intersecting realms of TV journalism, personal ambition, and moral corruption, revealing a complex web of scandal. Cervarich’s novel experiments with form, using a mix of journal entries, shifting perspectives, headlines, and photographs, although the fragmented structure can make the narrative difficult to follow. Readers who are unfamiliar with earlier series installments may also struggle to grasp the significance of recurring characters and backstory threads. Others will find much to appreciate in this sprawling, multithreaded narrative. It offers a vivid portrait of Bay Area TV journalism in the ’70s, capturing the evolution of a rapidly changing media landscape.
An ambitious read that’s well suited for readers fascinated by newsroom politics, regional nostalgia, and stories of the darker undercurrents of ambition.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.
See’s latest novel exposes a forgotten, ugly chapter in LA history—the brutal 1871 massacre of 18 Chinese immigrant men and boys.
In July 1870, two Chinese women arrive in Lo Sang, a dusty frontier town known by its white and Hispanic residents as Los Angeles. Seventeen-year-old Dove, the bound-footed daughter of an imperial scholar fallen on hard times, is the new second wife of Old Man Sing, a merchant in the tiny Chinese community on Calle de los Negros. Barefoot, dark-skinned Petal, sold into servitude to a Gold Mountain tong by her desperately poor peasant father, is destined for the Midnight Garden, a bawdy house owned by Headman Sam. Witnessing the newcomers’ arrival is Moon, the wife of a successful doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. Unlike Petal and Dove, she speaks English, and she assists her husband in his clinic. The three alternating narratives—Petal tells her story as she lives it in 1870; an elderly Moon recalls past events from 1926; and Dove’s tale is recounted in a distant third-person voice—create a portrait of a tiny immigrant community surrounded by a hostile culture and ruled by rival tongs. It’s a shootout between these disputing factions that sets off the horrifying events of Oct. 24, 1871, when a mob of about 500 white and Latine residents torture and lynch their Chinese victims. Although meticulously researched, See’s novel feels curiously flat. Despite continual descriptions of gunfights breaking out, Los Angeles never fully comes to life as a rough-and-tumble Wild West town. While the author’s female protagonists, inspired by historical figures, are well drawn (kudos to the feisty and determined Petal), most of her male characters—Chinese, Anglo, and Mexican—are as flat and indistinguishable as cardboard. Another drawback is See’s stilted and stylized dialogue, typical of historical fiction but wearying to the modern reader.
A flawed but necessary read about a dark moment in American history.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781982117054
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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