A dense, brilliantly rendered novel by a new master of Southern gothic.
Deputy Sheriff Will Seems—who’s recently returned to his faded Virginia hometown a decade after escaping to Richmond—investigates a murder with links to a horrific incident that still torments him.
When he was 16, Will, who is white, stood by while Sam Hathom, a Black friend, withstood a brutal beating by a gang of taunting kids that left him with physical and psychological injuries and a drug habit. Driven by guilt, Will has come back to deal with personal demons and to look after his strung-out friend. He also has to deal with the murder of a local man whose body he drags from a burning house. When his corrupt boss arrests Sam’s father for the crime based on circumstantial evidence, Will staunchly opposes him. Suspended from the force, he teams up with Bennico Watts, a strong-willed female investigator with a spotty history, who is hired by the murder victim’s angrily grieving mother. Knowing Bennico is a reckless spirit who was fired by the Richmond police for an illegal search, Will keeps his distance—until he starts breaking rules himself and finds her presence helpful. Relentlessly dark, with one wrenching exchange of violence, Wise’s impressive debut deeply penetrates the history of Will’s cursed family and equally cursed town. Streaming with and sometimes choked by rapturous imagery—a burning house “melting inward like blossom-end rot on some strange fruit”—the novel supports Bennico’s notion that “understanding a crime...had almost as much to do with the setting as the act itself.” In expanding the setting to Richmond, a prospering college town infected by a hateful right-wing presence, the novel conveys how American dreams can be defiled even in a place called the Holy City.
A dense, brilliantly rendered novel by a new master of Southern gothic.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780802162915
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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