An engaging mystery, best for baseball aficionados.
As the 1951 National League pennant race between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants heats up, a psychopath begins killing Giants fans in Levine’s baseball thriller.
Twelve-year-old Eddie Fein, an avid Dodgers fan, listens to the game with his father, Barry Fein. The Giants have taken a commanding lead, and Barry becomes enraged, leading to a fight between Eddie’s parents. An inebriated Barry throws his beer bottle across the room, and, with a slam of the apartment door, he heads out into the Brooklyn night. Two blocks away, 20-something Sandra Weinstock, delighted by the Giants’ win, goes out for a celebratory walk. The next morning, the police find her dead body washed up on the rocks surrounding Gravesend Bay. Barry’s best friend, Homicide Detective Nicholas DiFazio, is the lead detective of the investigation into her murder. Nick and Barry served together in World War II, and Barry once saved Nick’s life. They also share a secret from the war—one that leads Nick to suspect that Barry, who returned from the war emotionally damaged, might be the killer. Nick is also Eddie’s beloved Little League coach, and as Eddie becomes increasingly aware of Nick’s suspicions, he dangerously begins investigating the crime on his own to prove his father’s innocence. As the story winds its way to its surprising revelation, Levine packs the narrative with nostalgic social and cultural minutiae (like apartment dumbwaiters for collecting garbage and the ubiquitous candy store / magazine shop / soda fountains serving egg creams) evocative of NYC outer-borough life during the early 1950s, when baseball was king. But the element that makes this thriller unique is also what may limit its potential readership: Riveting, detailed play-by-play accounts of the final games in the play-off series (“Erskine’s arm came around in its familiar, over-the-top motion and almost delivered a wild pitch. It bounced in the dirt at Torgeson’s feet, caroming off Campy’s chest protector as he slid in front of it and blocked it”) are salted throughout every chapter, sure to delight baseball enthusiasts but likely to wear thin for non-fans.
An engaging mystery, best for baseball aficionados.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780578783413
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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