Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.
A savage debut thriller that renders the Electra complex electric, the mother/daughter bond a psychopathic stranglehold.
Camille Preaker is a cutter. At 13, she carved “queasy” above her navel, at 29, “vanish” on her neck. In the intervening years, she etched her entire epidermis from the chin down with cries for help. Entertainment Weekly TV critic Flynn discloses this information 60 pages into her explosive novel; before that, we know Camille as a hard-drinking, good-looking Jimmy Breslin wannabe, sent by a second-tier paper to cover two gruesome killings in her Missouri hometown. Nine-year-old Natalie’s corpse was found jammed between the Cut-n-Curl Beauty Parlor and Bifty’s Hardware nine months after another’s girl’s body was dumped in a creek. The murderer’s grisly signature? Both strangled corpses had their teeth yanked out. As she snoops around, Camille gets hot for a cute detective and anxious in her mother’s house. Haunted by the ghost of her sister, a child felled by mysterious illness, Camille warily befriends half-sister Amma, a snaky Lolita with precociously developed smarts and breasts. Bite-sized Queen of Mean who rules the town’s teens, Amma joins Camille in shuddering at their mother, Aurora, an oh-so-proper virago who pulls down a million dollars a year running a pig slaughterhouse. Mommie Dearest is afflicted with an outré psychological disturbance: She inflicts illness on her loved ones to then prove her sweetness by nursing them. Could she be the slayer? Or perhaps an even more hideous revelation awaits? Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women’s lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over.
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-34154-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.
A good Samaritan incurs a psychopath’s wrath in this debut thriller.
Veterinarian Cassie Larkin is heading home after a 12-hour shift when someone darts in front of her car, causing her to dump her energy drink. As she pulls over to mop up the mess, her headlights illuminate a couple having a physical altercation. Cassie calls 911, but before help arrives, the man tosses the woman down an embankment. Ignoring the dispatcher’s instructions, Cassie exits the vehicle and intervenes, preventing the now-unconscious woman’s murder. With sirens wailing in the distance, the man warns Cassie: “Let her die, and I’ll let you live.” He then scrambles back to the road and flees in Cassie’s van. Using mug shots, Cassie identifies the thief and would-be killer as Carver Sweet, who is wanted for poisoning his wife. The Santa Rosa police assure Cassie of her safety, but the next evening, her husband, Sam, vanishes while trick-or-treating with their 6-year-old daughter, Audrey. Hours later, he sends texts apologizing and confessing to an affair, but although it’s true that Sam and Cassie have been fighting, she suspects foul play—particularly given the previous night’s events. Cassie files a report with the cops, but they dismiss her concerns, leaving Cassie to investigate on her own. After a convoluted start, Chavez embarks on a paranoia-fueled thrill ride, escalating the stakes while exploiting readers’ darkest domestic fears. The far-fetched plot lacks cohesion and relies too heavily on coincidence to be fully satisfying, but the reader will be invested in learning the Larkin family’s fate through to the too-pat conclusion.
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293617-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
