A quietly absorbing story of fractured family ties and deception.
A high school teacher learns dark, unwelcome secrets may be hiding in her family’s tumultuous lives in Wells’ thriller.
Floridian Leigh Prentiss is upset when, at the last minute, her husband, Garrett, bows out of a family getaway. It’s not entirely surprising, though, as his law firm keeps him busy. So Leigh and the couple’s two kids, 15-year-old Jay and 7-year-old Jenny, head to their beloved three-story beach house on the East Coast of Florida. There’s good news: Leigh’s younger sister, Kristen, will join the family for at least a couple of days. It’s a chance for Leigh to confide in her sister about Garrett, who’s been distant—the once-close husband and wife now habitually argue. Garrett having an affair is definitely one possibility, but there’s a lot more going on than Leigh knows. Kristen, for instance, hasn’t told her everything about her own recent split, brought on after she caught her husband cheating. And Garrett is working through a few things of his own, namely an unexpected hitch with a startup company he’s got a share in. Meanwhile, over in Midnight Beach, Leigh has more than one happy run-in with handsome former Marine Jack McDermott, an ex-investment advisor turned beach patrol manager. His warmhearted nature and friendship are exactly what Leigh needs…but perhaps something deeper is growing between the two. In the midst of all this chaos, there’s someone angry enough to kill.
Wells’ story is an impressive exercise in subtlety. It draws readers in with its depiction of a strained marriage and a mother worried that her children miss their absent father; readers, at the outset, only know as much as Leigh, who simply can’t explain the “rift” between the couple. The alternating narrative perspectives of Kristen, Garrett, and others gradually illuminate all that’s been unfolding over the previous six months. The author gleefully piles on savory thriller ingredients: snooping through emails, the appearance of threatening notes, and suppressed resentment sparking hate-fueled revenge. Nevertheless, a few morsels wind up lost in the mix, such as one serious crime that the story, rather oddly, barely acknowledges. Leigh and Jack’s nascent romance is nuanced; they hit it off on an emotional level (“She felt as though he was an old friend, although they’d met officially only last evening at the concert”). But the novel’s highlight is the connection between Leigh and her kids. Like all great mothers, she loves them unconditionally, even as the incessantly sullen teen Jay ignores her and the much younger Jenny clings to her. Wells’ concise prose keeps the narrative moving at a steady beat—surprising turns come one after another. Most of the intersecting sub-plots wrap up convincingly; some are predictable, while others are left open, implying the directions certain relationships will go. The murder happens later in the tale than some readers may anticipate, but its impact is great and leads to an unforgettable ending.
A quietly absorbing story of fractured family ties and deception.Pub Date: July 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798375800363
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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