The ingredients for a suspenseful novel minus the payoff.
Three story strands, four women, and their thoughts on doppelgängers.
When, upon leaving a cafe, Naomi realizes she has taken the wrong coat—it resembles her own—she returns it to the woman it belongs to. At the cafe on another occasion, Naomi again spots this woman, Laura, who becomes the object of Naomi’s fascination (and eventually her lover). The novel swaps third-person narration for first-person narration by an unnamed woman whose job is to transcribe recordings of women’s personal stories for a ghostwriter. “I am transformed into every woman as I type,” the narrator reflects. “We are, in the moment I listen and type, the same person.” Soon the novel switches to what seems to be a transcript of a woman’s personal story; “I’m so lonely!” it begins. The novel interweaves the three narratives, inviting the reader to wonder how they’re connected. Alas, while the book is written with marvelously cool composure, none of the three strands is especially interesting: The reader is unlikely to share Naomi’s obsession with Laura, whose ethereality seems performative. Nothing much is going on in the transcriber’s life; the transcript snippets don’t go anywhere. And the women’s musings on having or being a double ultimately leave the impression of intellectual noodling. Some readers may find the book seductively mysterious: Johansson, the Swedish author of the novel Antiquity (2024), has set her scenes in an anonymous city in an unspecified past of landlines and cassette tapes. And some readers may be intrigued by the novel’s references to unnamed suspense films presumably invented by the author (although Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Marnie will come to mind). The transcriber’s summaries of the movie plots are compelling; if only this novel were equally so.
The ingredients for a suspenseful novel minus the payoff.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781646223138
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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