An intimate look at Hollywood’s dark secrets.
Glitz and gossip in the film world.
Lynch sets her entertaining debut novel in 1940s Hollywood, where aspiring actors are manipulated by studio executives and gossip columnists can make or break reputations with a keystroke. Edith “Edie” O’Dare, whose acting contract is nearing its end, becomes one of those reporters: After growing up poor in Boston, at 19 she won a trip to Hollywood and jumped at the chance to leave home. She was never catapulted to stardom, though; instead, she was cast in forgettable roles as “someone’s provocative best friend or madcap coworker.” Now, years later, she is looking for her next act. To earn a bit of extra money, she had long served as a source for Poppy St. John, the widely syndicated “Tinseltown Tattler.” But when Edie becomes the confidante of a young actress claiming to have been sexually assaulted by a popular star, she decides to branch out on her own. Not surprisingly, all of Hollywood circles the wagons around the star: “You go under contract, you say what they tell you to say,” Edie well knows. She needs to decide, in the actress's case and many others, what she is willing to disclose, whom she is willing to hurt or to help. In the Los Angeles Times, her column is christened “Do Tell.” Edie knows she’s not a corrective for the myths and legends that Hollywood creates about itself: “A large part of what I do is tell America what they want to hear,” she is convinced. And what America wants to hear—even as war rages in Europe—is salacious dirt. Although the plot lags when Lynch describes clothing, hairstyles, and makeup in too much detail, she doesn’t lose sight of a salient theme: Edie’s success depends on others’ vulnerability. Lynch’s characters—clad in designer gowns, inhabiting sumptuous mansions, and drinking champagne at lavish parties—are replaceable cogs in a powerful industry.
An intimate look at Hollywood’s dark secrets.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780385549370
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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