This pitch-perfect story about families and secrets starts with a punch and ends with a bang.
Mothers and sons are mired in a quicksand of deception in this tale of psychological suspense set in rural England.
The title of Cooper's fourth novel appears to give a nod to happy families ensconced in idyllic relationships, but it quickly becomes apparent that it's just another of the book's intriguing misdirections. Cooper builds the scaffolding of this secret-packed novel on a harrowing event in which either "a push or a punch" during a scuffle in a pub leaves a young man dead and another sent to prison. Left to pick up the pieces following this tragedy are the men's mothers. Chrissy Dean and Alice Lowe, once the closest of friends, are now irrevocably estranged—yet always on each other's minds. Alice lost her son, Robbie, and she's leading a campaign to oust Chrissy from the insulated village of Cromley. What Robbie and Chrissy's son, Leo, fought over is one of the mysteries running through the book, and the answer becomes more urgent when Leo is paroled and immediately goes missing. Into this already compelling storyline, Cooper drops other plot-driving grenades: Who is Georgie Fallows, a village newcomer who immediately embeds herself in the Deans' and Lowes' lives? What secrets is Alice's brother, Peter, hiding, and what hold does an older inmate have over Leo during his time in prison? As the race to find Leo pushes forward, the snowballing secrets strangling the two families begin to unravel. In a vertigo-inducing denouement of Hitchcockian proportions, "a push or a punch" seems to come full circle. Cooper, with her keen understanding of family dynamics, pushes her characters and her readers to wonder how far they would go to protect themselves and their children.
This pitch-perfect story about families and secrets starts with a punch and ends with a bang.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593719930
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.
When one woman takes on another’s identity to uncover a crime, they both become suspects in a murder.
Aubrey Price and Camille Bayliss come from different worlds, only crossing paths because of the discovery that Camille’s husband, powerful lawyer Ben Bayliss, is hiding something terrible that affects them both. As the novel opens, Aubrey is driving Camille’s Range Rover, then teetering into a bar on Camille’s high heels, with Camille’s dress and credit cards and a wig that mimics Camille’s hair, pretending to be her because Ben tracks his wife’s every move and expenditure, and Camille wants to create a smokescreen while she sneaks into his office in search of evidence of that unnamed secret. But the scheme goes awry, and the women become each other’s alibis after Camille finds Ben murdered in their home. The first part of the book builds suspense and misdirection well, with Aubrey and Ben’s straight-arrow partner, Hank Landry, serving as first-person observers in some chapters while others track Camille. She’s a wealthy and privileged woman but not a happy one, stuck under the thumbs of her husband and her tyrannical father, Randall Everett, who pretty much runs their small Louisiana town. Aubrey was orphaned as a teen when her parents died in a car crash and has proudly fended for herself ever since, coming to depend on her four roommates, who have become friends. But as the cast of characters grows, it seems as if almost everyone in town has a motive for killing Ben, and the piling up of suspects and movements among different timelines can sometimes be confusing. And it all comes to a frustrating end when, after a whole school of red herrings, the solution to Ben’s murder arrives out of far left field.
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593834459
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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