A solid thriller and a promising series debut.
In Edwards’ series starter, a gutsy emergency room physician is drawn into the dangerous hunt for a vicious serial killer.
Speeding to work just before sunrise, young trauma doctor Riley Brighton happens upon the body of an apparent hit-and-run victim in the middle of Los Angeles’s 101 freeway. A huge, menacing man with a black pickup abruptly warns her away from the scene; knowing first responders are on the way, Riley heads to LA City General, the hospital and medical school where she works in the ER. Her day only gets worse: The department head blindsides her with an interrogation about the recent death of a 6-year-old patient, a loss that shook Riley deeply (“Nothing had been the same since that night”), in a blatant attempt to scapegoat her for a colleague’s incompetence. The details of the hit-and-run suggest it wasn’t an ordinary accident—worse, there seems to be a connection to another recent fatality on the same stretch of freeway. That evening, when the police show up at Riley’s home with questions, she surmises that the victims were transgender. Riley’s sense of justice is outraged by the hate crimes, and she may be in danger as a known witness. She contacts “Avenging Allies,” a mysterious group that’s investigating the first highway murder, and gets caught up (against her better judgment) in the dangerous search for a savage monster as the body count rises. The novel’s plot, with its constant new developments, is a complicated web with many threads that take time to connect. (They add up to page-turning intrigue, but there are no surprise twists and little suspense.) Riley is an engaging hero, kind to her patients and colleagues, and courageous whether confronting obnoxious colleagues or putting herself in risky situations. The key supporting characters—including heart-of-gold Holly, a new friend of Riley’s, and Joe, the chief pathologist whose crush on Riley is an open secret—are also well drawn, though less well rounded. The narrative moves briskly, and although the office politics subplot has no direct relationship to the main mystery, it doesn’t slow things down and effectively demonstrates Riley’s character. The story includes gruesome medical details and mentions of child abuse, though almost all of the violence happens off-page.
A solid thriller and a promising series debut.Pub Date: May 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781647049683
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sugar Pine Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
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