THE NIGHT VISITOR

Name: THE NIGHT VISITOR
Author: Lucy Atkins
ISBN: 978-1-78648-218-1

by Lucy Atkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 2018

With shades of Rebecca and The Secret History, Atkins has produced an eerie page-turner that will have readers guessing from...

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An academic partnership turns sour in this tense and moody thriller.

Professor Olivia Sweetman has it all: a happy family life with her husband and three children and a career on the rise as both an academic and popular historian frequently appearing on television. When she hears about a Victorian diary—containing a scandalous confession—written by one of the first women doctors, she knows she’s found the topic for her first book. The diary, however, comes with a catch—a relationship with Vivian Tester, the woman who discovered it. Vivian is brilliant but mysterious and has a very different way of seeing the world than Olivia. She's an extremely competent researcher, and she and Olivia enter into a working relationship. As their work progresses, though, their relationship becomes increasingly fraught; both women keep secrets from the other, revealed to the reader in alternating chapters either narrated by Vivian in first person or from Olivia’s point of view in third. Author Atkins (The Other Child, 2016, etc.) peppers every page with hints of things unsaid and dark underlying secrets. Sometimes the foreshadowing is a little overdone and heavy-handed, but it does not take away from the incredible number of twists and turns that appear as the novel stalks toward its ending. There’s a ghost haunting the story, both literally and metaphorically, and that sense of unease keeps pushing all the way to the last, intense pages. A reckoning is coming, but why? The need to know what will happen when the inescapable comes to pass drives the reader ever forward even as a sense of dread pervades the narrative. Things must end, but they won’t end well.

With shades of Rebecca and The Secret History, Atkins has produced an eerie page-turner that will have readers guessing from the first.

Pub Date: July 3, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-78648-218-1

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Mobius

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.