Though more saga than mystery, this ambitious novel takes big swings and mostly succeeds.
An unflinching drama about queer Black history in the guise of a glittering, slow-burn mystery about a closeted actor in Hollywood’s golden age.
In Newson’s second novel, Aaron Toussaint, a Black Hollywood insider, tells the story of two men who were his friends and lovers before one of them died under suspicious circumstances. Aaron is an intriguing and unusual character: a married Navy man turned studio fixer—investigator/muscle/private relations specialist—who’s gay and deeply closeted. In 1971, he decides to seek justice for his friends by chronicling their fabulous lives and tragic deaths in the 1950s and ’60s in a letter to a renowned gay journalist who’s created an archive of queer history. Within that frame, real history and debates over identity play a prominent role in this sexy and political novel. Aaron and his lovers represent divergent approaches to masculinity and queerness in the mid-20th century. Brutalized by his father and brother as a child, Aaron is guarded and conservative as a means of self-preservation. His ambivalence about his own sexuality and his passionate relationship with the fiercely closeted and self-consciously macho war hero Lt. Horace “the Hornet” Dixon, whom he served under and fell in love with in the Navy, set key events in motion. Rising star Xavier C. Barlow is Aaron’s other lover. When Xavier is cast as Horace in a Hollywood biopic, he’s determined to strike a blow against the celluloid closet by surfacing the hidden romantic connection between Aaron and Horace as subtext in the movie. As Aaron chronicles Xavier’s rise and fall, the three men mingle with real, boldfaced names like Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, and Diahann Carroll. They love, protest, and debate with passion. Blending the sensationalism of James Ellroy and the social awareness of Walter Mosley (though not his elegance), Aaron vividly demonstrates why Xavier’s grand life and likely murder needs to be part of the historical record. It’s fascinating, and yet while Xavier’s violent death looms over the proceedings, the vast majority of the novel focuses on how the men lived—so much so that it’s easy to forget the mystery and investigation, which only come into focus at the very end.
Though more saga than mystery, this ambitious novel takes big swings and mostly succeeds.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781250406149
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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