A tidy little feminist revenge fantasy with thriller signposts.
Little shop of horrors.
Yoohee’s plant shop, located in a quiet neighborhood in Sejin City, South Korea, is a dream realized. As a teenager, Yoohee considered plants “a comforting presence, like a steadfast friend.” As an adult, she’s more philosophical: “‘Humans are just like plants’…With a little attention and tenderness, you could nudge them back onto the right track”—in some cases, anyway. The men Yoohee has known have proved resistant to her hypothesis. Take Hoyoung, the shop’s first male customer, whom Yoohee is seeing romantically: He’s careless and worse with her plants, yanking off the odd leaf or snapping the odd branch. At one point, Yoohee asks Hoyoung to be more considerate with the plants, and he responds gracelessly, moving her to grab the shovel she uses to attack weeds and bring it down on him “with a swish. The blade struck its target.” This is the first of several occasions when Yoohee will use brute force to redress a wrong, eventually expanding her scope to include wrongs perpetrated on other women. (Ultimately, Yoohee’s harrowing backstory is offered up as if to explain how she became someone capable of murder.) Like many agenda-driven narratives, this one requires a cartoonish strain of villain—in this story, the human male—which leads to flat characterizations. Nevertheless, Kang, a Korean writer, has terrific composure in capturing both the cozy vibe of the plant shop and the violence Yoohee unleashes within it. Kang gestures toward the thriller—she introduces a detective to her story—but her audience is those who aren’t in it for a traditional thriller’s payoffs; they are in it for the thrill of guiltlessly playing bystander to vigilantism enacted on behalf of a justifiably aggrieved group.
A tidy little feminist revenge fantasy with thriller signposts.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217187577
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.
A violent attack hijacks a woman’s memory in this novel of domestic suspense.
McFadden wastes no time pulling the trigger in this harrowing story that starts with gunfire then swiftly propels readers into a crack tale of secrets and misdirection. Originally self-published in 2016, the book carries the same formidable weight as McFadden’s later novels featuring unsuspecting women who lose their power then fight to recapture it—mostly from men who have betrayed them. That formula perfectly fits Dr. Charlotte McKenna, a 37-year-old dermatologist who isn’t looking for love until the most handsome man she’s ever seen begins to woo her. There are warning signs about Clark Douglas and Charlotte overlooks them to her detriment—but is he a killer? The novel has dual timelines split between events leading up to the day Charlotte barely survives a head wound meant to kill her and the months afterward, when she struggles to reclaim her memory and her mobility. In real life, McFadden is a physician trained to treat brain injuries. Her expertise gives Charlotte’s rehabilitation authenticity, and her writing talent makes it interesting and engaging. As good as that timeline is, readers will yearn to get back to the alternate timeline about who wants Charlotte dead. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte starts to remember who tried to kill her, and the clock is ticking toward their next attempt. McFadden dishes up plenty of suspects: Charlotte’s secretive husband, Clark; a former patient turned stalker who confronts Charlotte on her honeymoon; and the angry husband of a patient who blames Charlotte for his wife leaving him. Though the story is delicious and dark, McFadden brightens things up with a possible love interest for Charlotte and a surprise ending sure to please the author’s many fans.
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249617
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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