The plot is sound, the action exciting, and the characters resoundingly human.
International spydom meets cutthroat suburban elitism.
After the sudden death of her husband, FBI agent Lina Connerly temporarily moves with her teenage son across the country to Northern California. Her father has also died recently, and she figures she can deal with his house while Rory attends the local public school, giving them both a change of scenery after having lost Fred. The school has all the markers of affluent suburban America: overly involved parents, a ridiculous endowment, and the Wonder Test, an extreme standardized test taken by all the schools in Silicon Valley. Studying such esoteric categories as “Ethicalities” and “Future Functionalities,” students don’t attend any real classes but instead spend all of their time taking seminars that will prepare them for the test. Lina isn’t overly concerned about the school's eccentricities, but when she hears that three students have gone missing in past years only to reappear a week later, underfed and with their heads shaved, her spider sense begins to tingle. Having spent her FBI career in foreign counterintelligence, she can’t resist a mystery. Between pinging phones, following suspects, and staging interrogations, Lina eventually approaches the truth—and danger. When Rory’s girlfriend disappears on the eve of the Wonder Test, Lina and Rory must find her. Appealingly, all of this happens as Lina navigates her own grief, comes to terms with the way she has allowed her job to consume her, and faces the fact that Rory shares her interest in intrigue. The overlay of international spycraft on suburban California, whose shiny facade conceals the most heinous of sins and vanities, is surprisingly effective. Richmond also has fun by including a question from the Wonder Test at the beginning of each chapter, emphasizing the ridiculously competitive world of affluent high schools.
The plot is sound, the action exciting, and the characters resoundingly human.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5850-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
