An expert ticking-clock suspenser best consumed in one prodigious gulp.
The creator of FBI profiler Zoe Bentley—last seen in Thicker Than Blood (2020)—launches a new series starring a hostage negotiator whose past makes her just perfect for this case in both good ways and bad.
Eight-year-old Nathan Fletcher is kidnapped on the way home from his school bus stop by someone who demands a ransom of $5 million. It’s clearly an impossible sum for his mother, dental office assistant Eden Fletcher, to raise. Distraught because the caller told her she’s being watched, she reaches out to Lt. Abby Mullen of the New York Police Department, with whom she shares a terrible secret: As children, they were two of the only three survivors of cult leader Moses Wilcox’s suicidal standoff with the police. That bond, which is so frayed that Abby doesn’t even recognize Edie when she responds to her plea for help, will become pivotal because Edie’s ex-husband, David Huff, remained behind as one of the mainstays of a different cult run by Otis Tillman when his wife and their two children fled. Now, one of those children holds the key to the other’s well-being, for the man who snatched Nathan never imagines that Edie will come up with the money; he expects her daughter, Gabrielle, to raise it through the thousands of followers she’s collected as a teenage social influencer. The fact that the kidnapper is holding Nathan in a locked room furnished and decorated to look exactly like his own bedroom suggests an unusually deep-laid plan. Can Abby see around the twists Omer throws at her to rescue the boy before it’s too late?
An expert ticking-clock suspenser best consumed in one prodigious gulp.Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2287-3
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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