The bestselling McCreight focuses on class tensions in a plot that doesn’t quite rise to the heights of her previous books.
One woman’s death upends another woman’s world.
When Gretchen Falk and her husband, Richard, are awakened in the wee hours by police officers pounding on the door of their Upper East Side apartment, neither knows anything about why an up-and-coming artist named Frankie Callahan is dead—but it turns out that Richard knew Frankie fairly well, the two having met on a climbing expedition of Mount Kilimanjaro. The narration switches between Gretchen as her family copes with Richard’s arrest on murder charges and Frankie in the week before her death as she’s concerned about a man from her past; there are also scenes from the Kilimanjaro trip, which involved a tragic fall, as well as several interstitial musings from the point of view of an unidentified stalker. Much of what connects these characters has to do with American social class distinctions that are often played down; a good example would be the scene when the well-bred and wealthy Gretchen meets the poor-but-ambitious Richard at Dartmouth. There, they and their friends formed lifelong relationships, the kind where four guys wind up booking an expedition to climb a mountain together, trading jibes about past trips to places like the Dolomites and Patagonia. Richard, in his 50s, is co-head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs. His pals are Scotty (an attorney), Brooks (chief executive of his family’s firm), and Van (an entrepreneur). As the younger and less-privileged Frankie listens to them on Kilimanjaro, she becomes infatuated with Richard, who’s strikingly handsome and once harbored his own hopes of a life as an artist. Their bond grows during the ascent, especially after the aforementioned fall and their return to everyday life. That bond might have been more intriguing to examine than the reactions of the three Falk children to their father’s arrest, especially since the book’s denouement hinges on the darkest aspects of class consciousness.
The bestselling McCreight focuses on class tensions in a plot that doesn’t quite rise to the heights of her previous books.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9780593536445
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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