A dark and gripping small-town tale of a teenager rebelling against his family’s abuse.
Secrets and lies take a fearsome toll in Madonna’s neo-noir thriller.
Well-kept secrets prove crushing for those who aren’t ready to keep them forever. That’s a key message of this novel, in which Maggie Tallon and John, her abusive husband, attempt to start anew in Willeran, a small town in New York’s Finger Lakes region. The attempt proves impossible due to John’s rampant drinking and his violent treatment of Maggie, which also make life hellish for their 13-year-old son, Levi. Maggie has long used hairstyling and makeup tricks to hide her injuries: “A black eye vanished under dusky shadow. Bruises faded through layers of tinted foundation: green corrector while they were fresh, purple as they healed…Long hair helped.” Levi is frustrated by his mother’s promises to change things (“He wanted to scream until his throat bled, tell her their life was a fucking joke, how Dad would never stop”), so he retrieves a shotgun that he saw his mom painstakingly hide in the house when they moved in. However, he finds that his parents may have other secrets that he knows nothing about, a discovery with shattering consequences. Throughout the novel, Levi probes the past amid endless warnings to the contrary, as when his summer employer, Uncle Calvin, says, “Small towns get real big when people don’t like the questions you’re asking.” The author does a sterling job of hammering home this theme, especially when exploring his characters’ motives for keeping themselves, and others, quiet. A good example is in a late scene: “But he knew exactly what she was doing. She’s done it a thousand times before….Repeating her story until it felt real enough to share.”
In passages such as these, readers will find it easy to feel the repression of Willeran’s closemouthed culture, and the price of subscribing to it, although Levi is not among those who do so: “An hour ago, Levi had almost felt sorry for her….But that was an hour ago.” It’s just one of many snappish observations about human nature in Madonna’s novel, and they’re similar to the way that hardboiled masters like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett dished out larger truths about their characters, including the skewed morality that propels them down unsavory paths once they run out of options. Suffice it to say that it takes a skilled writer to paint such a picture successfully yet sensitively—as the author does through Levi’s point of view—without ever bogging things down in the picture-postcard sentimentality that his hero so despises. It’s a skill that becomes especially apparent in how Madonna handles the big reveal near the end, which will force readers to question their hunger for easy moments that explain characters’ traumas—just as Levi does, in pondering the best way to confront the local bullies: “They just hit you with a punch you never saw coming.” So it goes with this thriller, in all the best ways.
A dark and gripping small-town tale of a teenager rebelling against his family’s abuse.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Channel Street Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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