A fast-paced, romantic supernatural puzzler, nestled in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
Easley’s novel offers romance, a ghost story, a mystery, a lost treasure map, and even some home renovations.
Recently divorced 35-year-old Kate Ecklund is finally pursuing her longtime dream of opening a bed-and-breakfast in the shadows of the Cascades. She left a financially comfortable but emotionally stifling existence as a member of Seattle high society to remodel a Victorian mansion in picturesque Salmon Falls, Washington, where she and her 8-year-old daughter can start a new life. Kate’s musician brother is living with her to help with the renovations and set up his own studio space. Before long, though, they’re unsettled by another musical roommate: the piano-playing ghost of Blossom Thatcher, the mansion’s recently deceased owner. As Kate learns more about Blossom’s tragic past and the puzzling history of her new abode, she gets to know her new neighbors, many of whom harbor secrets of their own. Easley plays two storylines against each other with occasional chapters that focus on the events of Blossom’s life, featuring characters and themes that echo stories set in the present. This ambitious blend of genres results in a tapas-style sampler of delightful morsels that will leave readers hungry for more, especially its wonderful treatment of issues related to ecology, social class, and gender in both time periods. Easley keeps an impressive number of plates spinning throughout and ultimately ends with all of them intact. The characters are well drawn and the pacing is brisk, but it’s the setting that’s the star of the show: Like Louise Penny’s Three Pines, Salmon Falls has a small-town charm, surrounded by natural beauty, that makes it easy to pass the time there.
A fast-paced, romantic supernatural puzzler, nestled in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798991731003
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Ames Lake Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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