This white-knuckled creature feature delivers the goods.
In Okon’s novel, a scientist searches for an elusive, ferocious mermaid who he believes killed his father years before.
Logan Osbourne, at nearly 30 years old, is a cryptozoologist. He scours the world for cryptids—legendary creatures that have never been proven to exist, like dragons and chupacabras. Because cryptozoology is a pseudoscience, Logan and his colleagues, including his best friend Elliot Sheppard, get little respect or funding. But Logan himself has seen a cryptid in the flesh—two decades ago, when he was on a boat with his scientist father in the Hampton Bays. George Osbourne had been obsessed with proving that mermaids are real, and on that particular day, a monstrous, fishlike creature popped up and pulled George into the water while his horrified 9-year-old son watched. Now, an old friend from the Hamptons, Penny Swanson, calls Logan with news of disappearances in Minatuck, the Long Island town where Logan grew up and his father vanished. There have been odd sightings, as well; it that seems whatever grabbed George is still in the area and snatching locals, including Penny’s twin brother Rory. With Elliot in tow, Logan travels to Minatuck and looks into the disappearances and unexplained mutilations of some animals. The townspeople seem reluctant to divulge anything, particularly the chief of Minatuck’s private police force; this town, which Elliot bluntly dubs “plain old creepy,” definitely has something lurking under the surface. While Logan would like to “legitimize” mermaids, he’s more intent upon saving his former hometown from a murderous creature.
Okon’s suspenseful tale moves with impressive speed, beginning with Logan’s lengthy but riveting search for the thunderbird of Indigenous folklore; he hunts for information in Mexico with a wary cabbie and later scales an Arizona mountain. At the same time, the author ably develops his curious characters: George spiraled after his wife (and Logan’s mom) suddenly left them; Logan’s ex-girlfriend Aimee Dupres, who works for a deep-pocketed corporation, is his cryptozoology rival; and both Penny and a childhood bully (who targeted Logan and Rory) are Minatuck police officers. Minatuck itself is shrouded in a brooding atmosphere—certain locals seem to be hiding something, and dark-suited strangers show up in the present day as well as in Logan’s past. Knowing that a vicious aquatic monster can strike at any moment (especially when the hero is actively seeking it) makes any scene near water relentlessly chilling: “The inky blackness surrounded him. Fronds and seagrass undulated like ghosts in the currents. Logan shined a flashlight through the murky depths. His skin prickled with the awareness he was not alone.” That intensity increases even more in the final act as Logan gets closer to finding his quarry and, in the process, uncovers more than one surprise. While this novel is a solid standalone story, the worthy denouement leaves room for a sequel or a spinoff.
This white-knuckled creature feature delivers the goods.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781950080151
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Chelshire
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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