A hot mess.
Wealthy owners of a luxury hotel on a Greek island run afoul of a cult of wild women living on the beach.
Pochoda’s venture into dark horror is a clunky revision of The Bacchae revolving around four women and one uptight male jerk. Lena is the wealthy widow of a Greek hotel developer who died under suspicious circumstances on the site of his unfinished Agape Villas. Her son, Drew—as rigid, controlling, and misogynist as his father—has completed the project and now brings Lena; her best friend, Hedy; and his own pregnant wife, Jordan, to the island for a kind of soft opening where they will be the only guests. Already in situ is Luz, a former powerful drug dealer who did time in prison when her son turned her in to save his own hide; this backstory is the only remnant of the kind of book Pochoda has been so successful with in the past. Luz has become the leader of a group of women who live on the beach that adjoins the Agape property. Their nightly revels revolve around a DJ named BaXXus who has golden blood and takes the form of a mountain lion during sex, one of the various versions of “ecstasy” that may make this book off-putting to some readers. Also unpleasant are the constant expressions of revulsion for the aging female body. Drew on Lena: “Here’s his goddamn mess of a mother at last. Look at the state of her. That fucking caftan hiding fucking nothing. ‘Mom.’ To think that morning he’d thought of her as anything more than a saggy fifty-four-year-old ex-ballerina.” Lena feels about the same about her “worn,” “desiccated,” and “weathered” body, once so lithe and lovely (54 seems to be the new 94 here). At the heart of the story is the idea that “we grow the monsters that take us down”—both Lena and Luz have vile, treacherous sons, and pregnant Jordan is quickly picking up the vibe. You know those Greek myths—this won’t end well. Pochoda’s reliance on sentence fragments and single-sentence or single-word paragraphs add to an overall hasty feel, and probably not the kind of horror the author intended.
A hot mess.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851173
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
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
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