An eerie, transfixing page-turner.
In this stark Southern gothic, two Mississippi grifters grapple over the fate of a strange and elusive little girl.
The mercenary-like Burdean and vulnerable Keal first encounter her in a church where extreme violence has taken place—dead bodies sprawl on the ground around still-running vehicles. They find the girl, who is speechless, next to a frail old woman Keal just encountered wandering through the woods in the middle of the night muttering nonsense—a woman “lost in head and heart and soul” whom he has seen in clairvoyant nightmares so intense that he does all he can to avoid sleep. The grifters, who have been hired to deliver the girl to unseen culprits for unstated reasons, find someone she will talk to when they take her and the woman back to the woman’s house. The girl tells Cara, a victim of physical abuse who periodically drops by the house to look after the woman, that she [the girl] is “part of the hand of God.” “I believed something was wrong in the night and there is still something wrong in the night and it has gathered itself in the flesh and blood of that girl,” Cara muses. Plenty of blood gets spilled in this bleakly intense, darkly atmospheric novel—by shotgun, by raging wolf, by speeding car, by Cara’s 6-inch wooden crucifix. In full possession of what the man who hires Burdean and Keal calls “grim poetry,” Smith evokes “a dark so absolute that the light seemed to suck away into nothing,” the trickery of consciousness and the precariousness of living in “a world that offered no explanations.” For all that, Smith somehow locates hope in hopelessness, meaning in meaninglessness. To reverse something Keal says, when you care about the world, there is much to unravel, and doing so is part of being human.
An eerie, transfixing page-turner.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9780316573375
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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