A slightly uneven but effectively unsettling novel.
In the wake of a tragedy, a young woman tries to restart her life, but her new roommate has sinister plans to destroy her in Barrell’s thriller.
When Maggie Nevins’ parents died—they were both murdered in their home by a neighbor—she inherited their unsellable house and their “horrific debt.” She decides that she desperately needs to start her life afresh, so she changes her name to Margo Sharpe and moves from Cape Cod to South Boston, where she buys a small, dilapidated house; she can only afford it because it went into foreclosure. Margo takes on a roommate she doesn’t know, Lucy Somers, to make ends meet, and the stranger quickly reveals herself to be a very strange woman—shockingly messy and personally intrusive, and frequently asking Margo inappropriately personal questions. As time goes by, Lucy’s behavior grows odder: She snoops in Margo’s room, throws out Margo’s mail, and may have even planted dead rats in the home. She also goes on a date with Margo’s ex-boyfriend, Brad Ellis—whose father killed Margo’s parents—and tries to sabotage Margo by sending troubling messages (“I am hoping to talk to you about a corporate card. As you know, you don’t pay me a lot”) to her tech-firm boss, Corinne. Barrell captures Lucy’s creepy behavior with dramatic power throughout this complex tale, which unfolds slowly; one can’t help but admire the author’s literary restraint. Indeed, the more the reader learns about Lucy, the more Margo’s own mental health is thrown into question. This is a tense psychological thriller that’s brimming with suspense, and it’s intelligently composed and paced. However, the plot finally becomes convoluted, and the labyrinthine connections between Margo, Lucy, and Brad become hard to disentangle and accept. This flaw, though, doesn’t sink the novel, which remains a riveting tale; Margo, in particular, is a compelling character whose apparent levelheadedness masks a deeper, profound disturbance in her soul.
A slightly uneven but effectively unsettling novel.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 978-1954907720
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Woodhall Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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