A disturbing tale of love, ambition, despair, and redemption.
Rosenberg’s historical novel fictionalizes the struggles of the real-life Silver Dollar Tabor, the troubled daughter of Colorado “Silver King” Horace Tabor and his wife, Baby Doe.
The Tabor family, who once dominated the Colorado silver market while garnering riches, fame, and political power, has suffered drastic reversals of fortune. First, there was the scandal of United States senator Horace Tabor leaving his first wife to marry the controversial Baby Doe. Then came the silver crash, and Horace, who had all of his money invested in their Matchless Mine, lost everything. They moved from the splendor of Denver to the isolation of a shack next to the mine in Leadville. Horace died when his daughter Silver Dollar was still a child; a month later, her older sister Lily, whom she adored, left home. Silver was devasted—enter her imaginary playmate, Echo LaVode. When Silver finally leaves home, determined to become a movie star, Echo travels with her, packed comfortably in the further recesses of her mind. Silver, a talented singer and dancer, becomes a big player in movies. Down on her luck, she attempts the Slide for Life Challenge, a daring high-wire stunt spanning Denver’s Lake Rhoda. Attached to the wire only by a metal mouthpiece, she steps off the platform and begins sailing through the air…until she hits a snag in the wire. This darkly complex, twisty novel toggles between narratives occurring during two different time periods: Silver Dollar’s struggles from 1915 through 1925, and the ordeals of Baby Doe, still laboring at the Matchless Mine in 1932. Setting her tale against the evocative backdrop of Mob-controlled 1920s Chicago speakeasies, Rosenberg vividly brings to life the gradual, angry, and violent emergence of Echo as Silver’s increasingly dominant alter ego, a persona who exacts vengeance and precipitates mayhem while Silver “sleeps.” The author’s prose is riveting and meticulously detailed in scenes like Silver’s aerial stunt; she also composes lyrically magical passages, as when Silver becomes a tiger tamer (“The tigers emerged from the shadows, their massive forms filling the cage, magnificent stripes swirling like molten lava in the dappled sunlight”) and develops a mesmerizing relationship with the powerful wild cats.
A disturbing tale of love, ambition, despair, and redemption.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.
A violent attack hijacks a woman’s memory in this novel of domestic suspense.
McFadden wastes no time pulling the trigger in this harrowing story that starts with gunfire then swiftly propels readers into a crack tale of secrets and misdirection. Originally self-published in 2016, the book carries the same formidable weight as McFadden’s later novels featuring unsuspecting women who lose their power then fight to recapture it—mostly from men who have betrayed them. That formula perfectly fits Dr. Charlotte McKenna, a 37-year-old dermatologist who isn’t looking for love until the most handsome man she’s ever seen begins to woo her. There are warning signs about Clark Douglas and Charlotte overlooks them to her detriment—but is he a killer? The novel has dual timelines split between events leading up to the day Charlotte barely survives a head wound meant to kill her and the months afterward, when she struggles to reclaim her memory and her mobility. In real life, McFadden is a physician trained to treat brain injuries. Her expertise gives Charlotte’s rehabilitation authenticity, and her writing talent makes it interesting and engaging. As good as that timeline is, readers will yearn to get back to the alternate timeline about who wants Charlotte dead. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte starts to remember who tried to kill her, and the clock is ticking toward their next attempt. McFadden dishes up plenty of suspects: Charlotte’s secretive husband, Clark; a former patient turned stalker who confronts Charlotte on her honeymoon; and the angry husband of a patient who blames Charlotte for his wife leaving him. Though the story is delicious and dark, McFadden brightens things up with a possible love interest for Charlotte and a surprise ending sure to please the author’s many fans.
Starts with a bang and closes with a knockout punch of an ending.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249617
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
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
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