bookshelf

THE CABIN ON SOUDER HILL

Name: THE CABIN ON SOUDER HILL
Author: Lonnie Busch
ISBN: 978-1-982585-45-7

by Lonnie Busch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2020

More questions than answers. Lots more.

bookshelf

An Atlanta woman who reports her husband missing from the cabin they’re sharing in the Georgia woods doesn’t realize that his disappearance will rapidly become the most normal-seeming event in her life.

Michelle Stage has only recently forgiven her husband, Cliff, a used-car dealer, for his adultery. When he leaves their isolated cabin to track down the source of a mysterious light and then doesn't return, Sheriff Louden Fisk assures her that no one else has lived anywhere close by ever since the vanishing of realtor Pink Souder, who built the cabin, and his mother, Wiccan priestess Mattie Souder, years ago. Before Michelle even has time to shift from worrying to grieving, Cliff turns up minus a finger he claims to have lost in the car crash that claimed their teenage daughter, Cassie, who Michelle just knows isn’t dead. But since Fisk and Deputy Elmer Bogan claim that Michelle’s the one who was reported missing and that they’ve never met her before, she doesn’t really know what she knows. Under the circumstances, it’s logical, if not exactly reasonable, that soon after she steals a car and a gun from her older sister, Darcy, Michelle meets Pink Souder, and then his mother, who, during a visit to the hospital where Michelle’s been taken, miraculously identifies the Jane Doe who’s sharing a room with her, a woman who’s soon reported dead herself. Different readers will decide at different points that there’s never going to be a rational explanation for all the different realities that hover around the cabin on Souder Hill, but Busch keeps the mysterious atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife—not that that would have any lasting effect.

DEAR DEBBIE

by Freida McFadden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 27, 2026

Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.

bookshelf

A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.

Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.

Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.

Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026

ISBN: 9781464249624

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

- BOOK REVIEW
WANT TO KNOW A SECRET?
by Freida McFadden

- BOOK REVIEW
THE INTRUDER
by Freida McFadden

- BOOK REVIEW
WARD D
by Freida McFadden

bookshelf

WANT TO KNOW A SECRET?

by Freida McFadden ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2026

Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.

bookshelf

Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.

April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.

Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.