A sharp, strange, well-observed murder mystery.
In Spinelli’s thriller, a man contends with cancer, a husband with an appetite for younger men, the social gauntlet of a Hamptons summer…and murder.
Joseph Byron “JB” Pulaski, a 48-year-old sociology professor, has spent 17 years building a life in Sag Harbor with his husband, Mike, and their adopted son, Emilio. Mike has trouble with fidelity. The story opens on a summer luau at their home, with Mike already grinding against the latest in a long series of stray young men with practiced casualness while JB watches from the perimeter, cataloguing the Hamptons social theater with the cold eye of a man who’s learned to treat humiliation as data. Into this fraught milieu enters Gianni Cuomo, a pianist whose amber eyes miss nothing and reveal even less—he’s a new kind of trouble, a different species from Mike’s usual conquests. As the season accumulates its disasters—social, marital, and, eventually, criminal, with a murder connected to Mike’s infidelities—JB finds himself implicated in something that, even with his considerable intelligence, he can’t simply think his way out of. The author is shrewd in his choice of setting, getting the most out of the collision of old money and new desperation at Hamptons dinner parties, the McMansions in Bridgehampton, and the farmstand tomato prices debated with genuine moral urgency (“cultural lubricants intertwined as naturally as Montauk oysters and mignonette”). Spinelli renders this world with affectionate contempt, and JB is the perfect narrator—erudite, self-lacerating, and possessed of a dark humor that functions as both shield and weapon. The mystery mechanics are secondary to the character study, which is where the novel’s real ambitions lie. The middle section loses some momentum as the murder investigation idles and the ensemble’s interpersonal dramas unfold. The final act recovers the urgency, but readers may lament the distance traveled to get there. Still, JB’s voice is compelling enough to sustain the journey.
A sharp, strange, well-observed murder mystery.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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