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
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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