A high-casualty nightmare right out of the Twilight Zone, more memorable for its parts than its whole.
Hilton, whose last few tales have turned away from crime and detection toward something darker, takes a further step into full-on horror.
When he’s shopping at the stalls of curio dealers, Ben Taylor likes nothing more than getting a bargain he can mark up and resell at Taylor and King Curiosities, the shop he runs with his wife, Helen King. So he’s irresistibly drawn to a box offered by an elderly female traveler that contains a gold and bejeweled amulet he tells her is only gold-plated and paste. The amulet is indeed valuable, but the box itself, marked with indecipherable words in an unknown language, turns out to be far more consequential. When he attempts to open and clean it out, Ben is struck by a foul smell evidently emanating from a blackened tonguelike object inside that’s eager to inhabit and possess everyone who gets too close to it. The first victim is Jason Halloran, the rogue and thief who lives upstairs from Taylor and King, who suddenly and irrationally tries to strangle his girlfriend, drink and drug addict Belinda Sortwell. Shortly after Ben rescues Belinda from her boyfriend’s clutches, Jason’s found dead himself after apparently jumping from his fire escape. This horrific episode doesn’t end the carnage but merely launches the murderous spirit toward a new host who’ll repeat the pattern. Nearly every member of the tightly restricted cast—Ben, Helen, their part-time salesperson (Rachel Quinn), Helen’s mother, Gloria, and Cezary Nowak, the Polish fish-packer who lives upstairs from Jason—will be placed in mortal danger before Shay Connolly, an occultist specializing in demonology, drives the demon back into a safe place. Or does she?
A high-casualty nightmare right out of the Twilight Zone, more memorable for its parts than its whole.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781448315826
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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