The plot is sufficiently creepy and twisty, but without well-developed characters, the reader's buy-in will be limited.
A father’s quest for his kidnapped daughter, gone 13 years, may finally have borne fruit.
Hausmann’s debut, translated from the German, revolves around a young woman who has been held captive in a windowless forest cabin on the border between Bavaria and the Czech Republic. As the story opens, she has escaped, one of her two children in tow, only to be hit by a car on the road just outside the woods. She’s in intensive care, unable to explain much of anything; her daughter, Hannah, though extremely intelligent, has developmental issues that make her unhelpful to investigators as well. Once it’s determined that the injured woman’s name is Lena, the police are able to connect her with a 13-year-old cold case involving the disappearance of a college student in Munich. The round-robin narration switches among Lena, Hannah, and Lena’s father, Matthias Beck. Matthias has been counting and cursing the days—4,825 of them—since his daughter went missing. Now, at last, he gets the call he’s been waiting for, and he and his wife accompany the police investigator, a close family friend, to the hospital—only to find out the woman in the bed is not their Lena. But wait—there’s a little girl in the hallway who is their daughter’s spitting image. Hausmann’s novel has been billed as Room meets Gone Girl for its combination of mother and kids locked up in a hidey-hole with dueling, often dissimulating, unreliable narrators. But both of those blockbuster antecedents are strongly character-driven. Here, possibly in the interest of withholding information, the author has failed to make the central characters seem like real people, and the supporting ones are barely outlined. For this reason, the reveals in the latter part of the book are less exciting than they should be.
The plot is sufficiently creepy and twisty, but without well-developed characters, the reader's buy-in will be limited.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-25076-853-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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