A twisty and often riveting thriller.
A real estate appraiser is forced to evaluate her own life in Priamos’ dark thriller.
Catia “Tia” Drakos was formerly a handwriting analyst for California police departments, but she walked away from the profession because it made her too anxious. Now she’s a real estate appraiser to the rich and powerful in the Hollywood area. One recent client is Elise Davis, a friend from childhood who’s the daughter of famed actor Carson Davis. Elise goes missing shortly after Tia appraises her family’s mansion; shortly afterward, Tia receives the first in a series of mysterious notes. The first reads “He’s here early,” which may refer to her older fiance, Hugh, or to someone else entirely. Soon, Los Angeles police detective Antonio Ramirez, who’s investigating Elise’s disappearance, contacts her as a person of interest. Tia already has plenty of drama in her personal life: She’s been divorced less than a year from history professor Kyle Wilkins over the question of having children, and he’s in a relationship with unstable grad student Becca, who has a restraining order against her from a previous flame. As the notes that Tia receives get more threatening and escalate into assaults, she must appraise those around her and figure out who isn’t whom they seem to be. Over the course of this mystery novel, Priamos successfully develops a protagonist who has engaging flaws. It’s also intriguingly unclear if Elise's abduction is part of a revenge plot that’s targeting Elise, Tia, or a monied old-Hollywood family. In addition, Elise’s family offers up several viable suspects, including Carson’s soon-to-be-ex third wife as well as Elise’s estranged brother and her own prickly, pregnant spouse. Oddly, though, Tia never asks the key question of who would want her to be personally involved in solving the mystery. Still, this is an engrossing, layered volume despite the fact that Tia seems somewhat distracted at times by her own journey of self-discovery.
A twisty and often riveting thriller.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985430912
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Power Punch Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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