Time and place are fully realized in this murder story, making for a fascinating period piece.
Brighton spins a tale of murder and revenge in Gilded Age Buffalo in this thriller.
A very scandalous divorce looms for Alicia and Edward Miller, but Edward is found bludgeoned to death on New Year’s Day 1902, before it can happen. Not long after, Alicia’s lover—and a key suspect in the killing—Arthur Pendle, is (along with his wife, Cassandra) killed when their car is demolished at a railroad crossing. Sarah Payne, who loved Edward (though it was never consummated) goes on to found the Avenging Angel Detective Agency, fulfilling a dream born of her devotion to Sherlock Holmes stories. A trove of love letters that Arthur had sent to Alicia (which he told her to destroy, but she could not bear to do so) contains details of Arthur’s secret life as a bagman and fixer for the corrupt district attorney, Terry Penrose, a man who would not hesitate to have his own mother killed in pursuit of his ambitions. As various parties seek the letters, the spunky Sarah involves herself in the situation at great risk to her own life. Along the way we meet a dangerous psychotic, who convinces himself that he is in love with Sarah, and the hulking Harry Price, who is sent to kill her. The author is a talented storyteller, and it is hard to resist the very detailed and authentic world he creates, all leavened with a strong sense of irony: As Brighton writes, President McKinley was shot in Buffalo and lingered for five days before expiring, “still in agony and still in Buffalo.” Alicia Miller is an indelible character, a woman who came from the wrong side of the tracks to claw her way into Ashwood society. Sex is her weapon and she knows how to use it—in need of free legal counsel, she seduces a lawyer, then threatens to tell his wife. In her way, she is as ruthless as Terry Penrose, yet the reader feels for her and even roots for her. She and Sarah are wonderful complements and effectively drive the plot.
Time and place are fully realized in this murder story, making for a fascinating period piece.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9798987696408
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ashwood Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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