An intriguing premise, but the execution needs improvement.
Morrissey’s atmospheric suspense debut introduces a troubled female police transcriber who goes beyond her job description to solve a drug case.
Gritty Black Harbor, Wisconsin, is a small city with big-city crime, the kind of place “that not only keeps decent people just racing past on the highway but attracts criminals and seedy characters who need somewhere to hide.” Newly hired police transcriber and aspiring writer Hazel Greenlee works the night shift, transcribing incident reports. On one of her first evenings, she's horrified when her next-door neighbor Sam approaches her office and writes a message on the frosted window: "I hid a body." The finger he uses is not his own. The following night, Hazel is startled to receive a report from Investigator Nikolai Kole, who had been suspended from the force six months earlier. She learns that Sam’s confession is tied to the overdose death of a 9-year-old boy at the hands of pill pusher Tyler Krejarek. When Hazel meets the “criminally attractive” Nik, she soon gets drawn into the investigation and a steamy affair despite being married to the controlling, gun-loving Tommy. As a former police transcriber, the author writes what she knows. It’s a shame she doesn’t explore this unusual law enforcement world in further detail. What starts out as an intriguing police procedural gets sidetracked into romantic suspense (plenty of sex but not much suspense), mixed up with some marital and family drama, and topped with a bit of an unreliable narrator. The overwritten prose with its excessive use of similes doesn’t help. People’s faces are too often compared to punctuation marks (“The vulpine lady’s smile deepened, a pair of parentheses framing her lurid red lips”).
An intriguing premise, but the execution needs improvement.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2507-9595-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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