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DON'T TURN AROUND

Go ahead and suspend your disbelief. Every shiver will tell you it’s worth it.

A true-crime author whose whole life seems to have been dictated by her brush with a killer when she was a child is forced to confront the demons he unleashed.

Kate Summerlin was 11 when she sneaked out of her bedroom window, wandered around the wooded area surrounding her yard in upstate New York, and found the elaborately posed body of Melissa Cornelle, a former student of her father, Seagate College professor Arthur Summerlin. Even worse, the killer, who was still on the scene, came up behind Kate, touched a gun barrel to her neck and commanded her, “Don’t turn around.” How much more stressful could things get? Well, Melissa’s was only the first of 11 murders committed and staged by a killer signing himself Merkury. A newly discovered victim, Seagate student Bryan Cayhill, stretches this string to 12. And Kate, who’s widely associated with the case even though she’s always avoided it in writing her own books, is covering up some terrible secrets about that night, beginning but not ending with the fact that she and Merkury had a much longer conversation than she reported to Alexander Police Chief Vera Landen or anyone else. Canny spine-tingler Dolan brings his pot to such a rolling boil of violence and shocking revelations halfway through that you may wonder what could possibly follow. Rest assured: Things could get even worse, even though you’ll have to swallow some wild implausibilities along the way.

Go ahead and suspend your disbelief. Every shiver will tell you it’s worth it.

Pub Date: April 2, 2024

ISBN: 9780802162823

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

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WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS

A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.

Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.

Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.

A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9780593548981

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024

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TELL ME WHAT YOU DID

Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.

A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.

Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?

Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9781464226229

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024

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