A worthy meditation on the struggle to atone.
In Humphrey’s novel, a murder sparks self-reflection among the residents of an island community.
Jack Karlsson is a former music prodigy turned wolf conservation obsessive. Sahara Moses is a cop studying to qualify as a paramedic. Tomas is an ex-soldier struggling to leave the war behind. Esther is a teenage girl unaware of just how many secrets plague her, struggling to understand why “everything she touches seems to fall apart.” The narrative follows these characters as they confront the aftermath of a suspicious death on the island they call home. There is a mystery to be solved, but it’s the tumult of Jack’s guilt-ridden past that most prominently shapes the story. Unable to forgive himself for his sins, Jack long ago condemned himself to a life of exile and withdrew from the music scene he was thriving in. Now, he lives on Hollow Island, writing music under a pseudonym and falling increasingly under the thrall of the semi-mythic wolves that haunt the narrative. His niece Esther comes to stay with him for the summer; she’s struggling to stay afloat while beset by an eating disorder and an increasingly fragmented family. Love may just save both her and Jack, but before they can move on, truths must first be revealed. Guilt and the difficult path to self-forgiveness are at the emotional core of Humphrey’s novel. Lines like “It’s part of having children, learning not to hate other people for letting them grow up” offer startlingly clear insights into the complexities of family. The wolves that may or may not have made it to Hollow Island function as a MacGuffin that simultaneously symbolize Jack’s unraveling mental state and lend the novel a fablelike quality. The large cast of characters bring the island to life, though the focus is on the familial relationship between Jack and Esther—the mystery of the murder is secondary to their attempts to find and forgive themselves.
A worthy meditation on the struggle to atone.Pub Date: March 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781977280978
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Outskirts
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
