An action-packed and fiercely feminist big-screen–ready chiller.
Two very different women find themselves in a fight for their lives in Barry’s adrenaline-spiked sophomore thriller.
Austin bartender and aspiring journalist Cait Monaghan couldn't have known a disastrous one-night stand with an up-and-coming country musician would change her life. Cait is shocked when the guy wraps his hands around her throat during sex and chokes her until she nearly passes out. When Cait posts an anonymous piece about the experience online, it’s a hit, but she’s eventually outed as the author. Sympathy inevitably falls on the guy’s side, and her life and livelihood are threatened. The vitriol of it all inspires her to seek out something different, and she volunteers with the Sisters of Service, who help women in crisis. Cait is to drive her new client, the imminently poised Rebecca McRae, from Lubbock to an Albuquerque clinic, but once they hit the road in Cait’s ancient Jeep, they realize that someone seems determined to make sure they don’t make it in one piece. Both women are hiding secrets, and Cait is convinced that the man menacing them with his pickup truck is after her, but Rebecca is equally convinced that she’s his target. As the attacks escalate, Cait and Rebecca must work together to survive their hellish road trip, and Barry builds a believable bond between the two women, born of both necessity and something deeper. The present-day narrative is cut with tidbits from each woman’s life, and Barry gets inside the heads of men both intimately and peripherally connected to them, offering a disturbing glimpse at what drives men to horrible extremes as well as the constant sacrifices, big and small, that women are expected to make for them. Barry’s electric, perfectly paced tale reads like the gritty lovechild of Thelma and Louise and Spielberg’s Duel, and readers will cheer for Cait and Rebecca all the way to the end of the road.
An action-packed and fiercely feminist big-screen–ready chiller.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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