A darkly tragic novel featuring a profoundly flawed antihero.
In Bird’s crime thriller, a down-and-out North Carolina cop with a drinking problem inhabits a world of dark menace and self-destruction.
Mike Lunsmann seemingly had it all, just four years prior to the opening of this grim meditation on midlife angst and alcoholism. Back then, he was a hotshot police detective in Craven County, North Carolina,with a wife who loved him and a son who didn’t yet think his dad was a total jerk. That was all washed away after Mike’s descent to the bottom of a Tennessee whiskey bottle. Now he’s a beat cop, and things take a nasty turn when he has a particularly ugly encounter with his family; if he had any hope of repairing their relationship, it’s now effectively gone. Still guided by the “Little Man” in his head “pulling all the wrong levers,” Mike is shot during another alcohol-soaked foray into the night. Awakening in a hospital bed two days later, Mike learns that the gunshot to his arm could have easily killed him. Friendly physician Harold Lasky tells him point-blank that if he doesn’t quit boozing, he’ll die. Sadly for Mike, there are even more immediate threats to his life, because the rifle bullet that pierced his arm just happens to place him in the middle of heinous murder mystery involving four teenagers. The killer’s still out there, and Mike is no shape to track them down. Still, he’s got to try. Over the course of this novel, Bird’s troubled protagonist is beset by demons from within and without. The only question is: Which is worse? That central dilemma helps to propel Bird’s drama forward. Along the way, the author packs his prose with plenty of gumshoe grit: “Next morning Mike awoke with a jackhammer headache and the taste of vomit still fresh at the back of his throat. For a long time he lay still beneath the covers, struggling to arrange whatever happened the night before into some kind of orderly account.” However, it’s his preoccupation with the complexities of his protagonist’s psychological struggles that make this thriller stand out from the pack.
A darkly tragic novel featuring a profoundly flawed antihero.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 9798989198047
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Piper House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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