A complex series continuation that’s challenging but often gripping.
This second entry in Carlisle’s “What Happened to Mia Davis?” series delves further into the details of an ongoing murder mystery.
The author’s follow-up to her series debut, Reasonable (2023), backtracks to years before Elaine Reid’s death in North Carolina in 2023, and her former best friend Cat Clark’s arrest and indictment for the crime. Effectively narrating from the three first-person perspectives of central characters Elaine, Cat, and police detective Rachel McGowen, the book fills in the details of Elaine’s murder, beginning by highlighting the victim, the killer, and the former best friend caught in the middle. As Elaine’s body floats above the carnage, she becomes a spectral spirit who must now attempt to resolve the crime from beyond. The novel sketches in Elaine’s history in 2007 and 2008, during her Green Valley University collegiate days, when she dated moody boyfriend Evan Summers. When she met his caustic family, they were a shocking contrast to her own affluent upbringing. For his 20th birthday in 2007, she got him a fake ID, using the name and face of someone from a 1950s class yearbook. Other chapters detail Elaine’s formerly close friendship with Cat and the latter’s struggle with alcoholism. Readers also learn about how her classmate Mia Davis and then-frat boy Tim Clark came into the picture, with the latter eventually becoming Cat’s husband. As Carlisle weaves more strands into the plot’s tangled tapestry, readers may have trouble keeping track of them all. Although the book’s pacing is snappy throughout, the timeline jumps between the present and past frenetically—moving from the misinterpreted crime scene, where ghostly, invisible Elaine works to communicate with Cat, to Elaine and Cat’s earlier assessments of love’s jealousies and pains. Finally, the story dives into Green Valley detective McGowen’s diligent, superlative policework, which unearths a string of other deaths. Carlisle fits all the puzzle pieces together with a deft hand yet still makes room for a thrilling cliffhanger, which leads into the trilogy’s planned final installment.
A complex series continuation that’s challenging but often gripping.Pub Date: May 13, 2024
ISBN: 9798869160461
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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