An entertaining occult thriller that mixes captivating magic with bracing psychological realism.
An American kid travels back in time to an ancient society while his family fruitlessly searches for him in Halbert’s historical fantasy adventure.
It’s 2010, and the Keane family—mom Lyana, historian dad Ian, snarky teen daughter Ariel, and son Zach, a neurodivergent boy who obsessively counts things—are ensconced in a spooky old Tudor house in Littleton, Massachusetts. One night, Zach starts climbing the staircase and somehow ends up in an ancient society, where he befriends Akolo, a young boy brought to the city by the king after his village was raided. The king also brought back a chest. The two boys have ouroboros-shaped amulets that glow prettily near the chest, and the voice of God duly pronounces them “servants.” (Zach also miraculously gains the ability to speak the native language.) The king wants Zach and Akolo to harness the chest’s power for him, and is delighted when Zach figures out that objects placed beside the chest during a lunar eclipse—a blood moon—become imbued with divine mojo. Meanwhile, as months go by, the distraught Keanes refuse to entertain the likelihood that Zach is dead. Ian pursues seemingly unhinged theories regarding his disappearance while Lyana perceives whispering voices and unsettling visions of a blood-drenched girl. Their suspicions fall upon Marshall, the house’s informal caretaker, who lives in a cabin filled with rare ancient books and has an ouroboros tattoo; their misgivings heighten when Ariel discovers a photograph of him from the 1800s. Zach is working from his end to find a way back to the 21st century before the king takes him and Akolo back to Akolo’s village to help rebuild the temple, which will sever Zach’s access to the time-travel portal.
In this second installment of their Goodpasture Chronicles series, husband-and-wife authors Jason and Rhonda Halbert (writing under the pen name R.J. Halbert) create a richly textured portrait of an ancient society. Zach adroitly navigates palace intrigues, the king’s despotic whims, and the potentially fatal chest, portrayed by the Halberts in punchy, mordant prose. (“The sound was a muffled scream, as if the man was being strangled,” they write of a soldier forced to approach the chest as an experiment. “Akolo leaned forward to get a better look, then wished he hadn’t when he saw the man’s face—it was white as a tunic and frozen in fear. This man was dead.”) The contemporary branch of the narrative is a tense study of a family disintegrating under pressure, then struggling to regroup, written in evocative prose that strips bare the characters’ weaknesses and comforting delusions. (“Some of his best academic insights had come with a glass in his hand, the whiskey warming his thoughts until patterns emerged from chaos,” Ian tells himself as he hits the bottle. “Just one, he rationalized, already rising from his chair. Just enough to think clearly. For Zach.”) The result is a page turner with real literary depth.
An entertaining occult thriller that mixes captivating magic with bracing psychological realism.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781963366099
Page Count: 266
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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