A powerful, humane novel that turns the headlines of recent years into a moving story of loss, courage, and hope.
Hayes’ novel explores themes of conscience, corruption, and the price of truth in a divided nation.
In 2017, Holly Bagley, a young Indiana police officer, is trying to reconcile duty, family, and conscience in an era of political upheaval. The narrative opens in the shadow of Donald Trump’s rise (“Bumptious Donald Trump, avatar of festering grievances, had taken the White House”) and moves swiftly into a world where private pain and public tension collide. When Holly partners with detective Garry Henderson, an older Black officer mourning the loss of his teenage son, the story expands into a broader exploration of race, grief, and moral responsibility in small-town America. Hayes’ prose is direct yet reflective, often capturing the quiet ache beneath the surface. Holly’s longing for her Marine boyfriend, Jimmy, who’s stationed in Afghanistan, mirrors the novel’s deeper themes of memory and disillusionment. The author renders Jimmy’s trauma with raw authenticity: “Body parts lying in the street like trash... It’s the stink, the stink…man.” Such scenes feel painfully intimate, illustrating how war and violence reverberate beyond the battlefield. Throughout, Hayes deftly balances a crime-driven plot with emotional realism. The partnership between Holly and Henderson evolves amid rising racial tensions and community fractures as both characters confront what it means to serve justice in a country where the concept of justice itself feels uncertain. Later, corruption seeps inward when Holly’s own father becomes entangled in a suspicious evidence case. “Bottom line,” she tells her superiors, “I wear the wire or I’m out of a job—is that your deal, Chief?” The moment captures the book’s essence: personal conviction colliding with institutional rot. Hayes’ prose blends procedural grit with emotional candor. He shows compassion even for the most flawed characters, acknowledging that “grief could be a dismal sojourn in hell if precipitated by an event you had no hand in creating.” Despite its density, the story remains propulsive, culminating in revelations that test faith, duty, and forgiveness.
A powerful, humane novel that turns the headlines of recent years into a moving story of loss, courage, and hope.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798822988347
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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