A suspenseful story of buried trauma, female friendship, and the cost of secrets.
In Miller’s psychological thriller, a secretive married couple become the targets of a serial killer.
It’s 2024, and Pennsylvanians Emily and Tristan Rose have been married for five years, yet both have hidden important facts about themselves. Emily found her college roommate, Cassie, brutally murdered seven years before; she still suffers from PTSD and believes she was the intended victim. When she meets Tristan shortly after the attack, she’s relieved to have found someone who apparently doesn’t know about the violent incident. However, he not only knows all about the killing, but he also believes that he knows who’s responsible. When another local homicide eerily mirrors Cassie’s, Tristan is convinced that killer has tracked Emily down, so he persuades her to go on a “solo retreat” in a remote cabin in the North Carolina mountains, ostensibly so she can focus on finishing her novel-in-progress. When he drops her off, they run into Lexi Lincoln, who was attacked and left for dead in Tristan’s hometown 21 years earlier. The past comes back to haunt all three characters as they become drawn into a twisted cat-and-mouse game with a murderer. Miller delivers a thrilling mystery with sharp twists and taut pacing, but it also powerfully touches on deeper themes, such as trauma, resilience, and the meaning of friendship. Threaded throughout the narrative is the fairy tale Maid Maleen, the subject of Emily’s novel about a young princess and her maid; they’re locked in a tower and forgotten, and they must courageously act to save themselves. This aspect is one of the novel’s greatest strengths, as this story reflects the growing bond between Emily and Lexi, who must rely on each other to escape their own metaphorical prison: “Your prince has forgotten you. Your father is most likely dead. If anyone remembers we’re here, they no longer care. Nobody’s coming to save us, Maleen.” Some plot turns are predictable, but the final twist arrives unexpectedly, although readers may be divided by its unconventionality.
A suspenseful story of buried trauma, female friendship, and the cost of secrets.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781961427303
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Brown Street Books
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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