A subdued and gripping character-driven thriller that weaves in real-world history.
In Rick and Mike Hobbs’ historical novel, a sacred Indigenous American burial mound serves as a locus of suffering.
In the 1930s, young friends Beau Addington and Willie Stanford go deer hunting on their own in Abbeville, Georgia. After a run-in with an aggressive man in the woods, they wind up lost but thankfully get a helping hand from Sylvie, a Muscogee. Near her cabin is a burial mound that, while considered sacred, had been the site of brutality in the early 19th century. The Muscogee sacrificed children to the mound’s “Great Spirits,” but that changed nothing as the white settlers in the area brought relentless violence and disease (“the Great Spirits were angry. The blood sacrifices had not appeased them”). Beau and Willie’s lives continue: They graduate college and fight in the United States Army during World War II. Back in Abbeville, they make enemies of cousins Ernie, Earl, and Conway Dunphy. This nefarious trio proudly engages in extortion (strong-arming locals with acts of vandalism); carrying a grudge from their school days, they aim their hostility at Beau and Willie and set in motion a kidnapping. Brothers Rick and Mike Hobbs unspool a deliberately paced tale; the Muscogee people’s backstory is so copiously detailed that Beau and Willie don’t appear in the first quarter of the book. (The story eventually centers around the two friends alongside various Abbeville residents.) The narrative includes intriguing nods to historical events including the Creek War of 1836 and Pearl Harbor, the latter of which motivates Beau and Willie to join the Army. The absorbing melodrama offers a few notably dark turns—the conflict between the Muscogee people and the white settlers is quite ferocious, and the Abbeville townspeople’s search for an abducted individual is memorably desperate.
A subdued and gripping character-driven thriller that weaves in real-world history.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781633814264
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Maine Authors Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
BOOK REVIEW
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