A perfect recipe for nine sleepless nights.
The latest collection from the indefatigable Oates reprints a recent novella along with eight shorter nightmares.
Nightmares is an even more apt term than usual for these stories, whose meanings are developed not by well-made plots but through flashbacks, reflections, or complications of their powerful opening tableaux. “Night, Neon,” the longest tale, supplements its presentation of a heroine who’s just learned that she’s pregnant with a systematic account of her relationships with abusive men that makes this news a decidedly mixed blessing. In “Curious,” an unrepentantly intellectual novelist who's asked “Where do you get your ideas?” recounts his obsession with a supermarket checkout girl. “Miss Golden Dreams 1949” is spoken in the spectral voice of a Marilyn Monroe clone offered for sale. The relationship the heroine of “Wanting” strikes up with an artist reaches a dead end that reveals that “wanting has doomed her.” “Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino Ca” provides a litany of more or less self-contradictory reasons why a member of the Manson family should be paroled on her 15th try. “Intimacy” shows a professor’s relationship with a menacing student becoming increasingly fraught without becoming increasingly well specified. The title character of “The Flagellant” constantly punishes himself for an unspeakable crime for which he cannot express remorse to his jailers. The caretaker of an ailing mother spirals out of control in “Vaping: A User’s Manual.” And in “Detour,” the story that seems to be the exception to the anti-plot rule, a woman forced to take a detour two miles from her home slips the traces of her humdrum life and sinks into a hallucinatory alternate reality that shakes her to the core before releasing her.
A perfect recipe for nine sleepless nights.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61316-230-9
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.
An author is targeted by a fan who just can’t let her go.
Arden Bowie has had plenty of tragedy in her life, but now she’s finally on top. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Ohio to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She soon became part of their loving family and grew up to become a writer and bookseller. When her debut novel is published, she meets Dustin Dubecki at her first event. He showers her with praise, asks for writing advice, and wants to take her out for coffee. Arden tells herself he’s just a little awkward, but then he keeps showing up at her local events—and, even stranger, she’s sure she sees him lurking at her event in New York City. When he bursts into her apartment one night and assaults her, Arden’s calm life is shattered. Dustin gets a five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility; Arden spends most of that time rebuilding her sense of stability. Eventually, she moves to Oregon to start a new life where Dustin can never find her. But even though she has a beautiful home, a thriving career, a doting family, new friends, and even a potential love interest in a former cop named Gideon Riley, Arden can’t escape Dustin’s rage when his sentence is finally up. Roberts toggles between Arden’s point of view and Dustin’s, giving the reader occasional glimpses into his extremely twisted mindset. Although Arden’s attempts to escape Dustin are engrossing, the story stalls in the middle when far too many pages are dedicated to Arden purchasing and decorating a house. But the excitement picks back up when Dustin, a truly odious villain, re-enters the story. It’s also satisfying to see Arden grow into someone who refuses to be a victim, even as she deals with horrifying circumstances.
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250413581
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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