A book that proves light touches can leave lasting impressions.
A restaurant-based mystery reveals more than just the culprit in this sprightly drama.
On the morning of what promises to be a very busy day at Aunt Orsa’s, the only fine dining restaurant in a Midwestern town, a crime is discovered. Danny, the owner’s nephew, is making his usual health and safety rounds when he discovers 22 rib eye steaks are missing. The theft, on top of a slew of unusually harsh Yelp reviews, spells big trouble for the restaurant, a community staple largely dependent on business from the local university, which is set to host a famous visiting author that very night. The irascible owner, Orsa, is incensed and immediately starts an investigation. While the rib eyes do represent a financial loss for the restaurant, what bothers Orsa more is the timing. It seems like a deliberate sabotage, but who among the employees she thinks of as extended, if slightly disappointing, family could have it in for Aunt O’s? The investigation proceeds in vignette-style chapters that explore each character’s backstory, delving into their complex interrelationships and the baggage they carry with them to and from work every day. Is the culprit Jane, the Mennonite pastry chef, whose secret appointment after her shift necessitates a disguise she’s stored in her locker? Or Edgar, the hard-partying Guatemalan prep chef, whose car harbors a secret and a terrible smell? Is it Kenzie, a “real-life Barbie,” who is only waiting tables as a condition of her wealthy parents’ continued financial support, or Shannon, the bitter pantry chef, whose longed-for promotion to front-of-house is permanently delayed? As the day unfolds, replete with all the ordinary chaos of a busy service, the characters’ stories overlap to yield not only the answer to the mystery of the missing steaks, but also a tender tale that seeks the “immeasurable satisfaction” of an ordinary job well-done. In what is largely a light and funny novel, Kauffman nevertheless touches some of the deeper mysteries of the human condition: desire, longing, and an inchoate sense that there is something larger than our circumstances which binds us all together.
A book that proves light touches can leave lasting impressions.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781640097483
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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