by Kaira Rouda ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2021
The guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
Rouda hits the ground running and never stops in this cage battle, fueled by resentment and rage, between a wealthy CEO’s first and second wives.
The meeting to celebrate the initial public offering of EventCo, the highly successful social-arrangement corporation founded by John and Kate Nelson, is a festive celebration that barely conceals the simmering rivalry between Kate and John’s second wife, Tish, who’s only four years older than his daughter, college senior Ashlyn. No sooner have the corks been popped than Tish triumphantly whisks her exhausted husband off from the Columbus suburb of Grandville to their house in Telluride for a weekend away that John never returns from. More precisely, he returns in an urn after Tish, defying his long-standing burial plans, orders his remains cremated following his fatal heart attack. Now that John’s dead, you might think the war between his two wives would wind down. In the practiced hands of Rouda, though, hostilities continue to heat up. Both wives jockey to line up influential allies at the funeral. Each wife tries to get the other one ejected from EventCo’s headquarters. Each produces a will tilted heavily in her favor. And when Ashlyn, whom Tish befriended in an attempt to move up the ladder after she was hired as John’s executive assistant, makes it clear that she stands with her mother, Tish digs deeper into her nefarious bag of tricks. The clash of these titans, whose superpowers would make them right at home in the comic-book universe if they’d just turn in their designer outfits for masks and capes, is so much fun that you’ll be sorry to see it end with a final pair of zingers.
The guiltiest of guilty pleasures.Pub Date: May 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2594-2
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Share your opinion of this book
More by Kaira Rouda
BOOK REVIEW
by Kaira Rouda
BOOK REVIEW
by Kaira Rouda
BOOK REVIEW
by Kaira Rouda
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
by Riley Sager ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2022
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Share your opinion of this book
More by Riley Sager
BOOK REVIEW
by Riley Sager
BOOK REVIEW
by Riley Sager
BOOK REVIEW
by Riley Sager
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.