A mostly riveting tale of a frantic criminal on the run.
After faking his death, a con man resorts to murder in a desperate attempt to keep his second life a secret in Spitalli’s thriller.
Lydia Scranton is lucky to survive after a plane she’s piloting crashes into Florida’s swampy Everglades. Her husband, Joel, however, is presumed dead after searchers fail to find his body. But eight years later, airboat operator Dan Clayton has a story for Joel’s daughter, Jane Cartwright-Scranton, an FBI agent at the Chicago office. He claims that on that day, he rescued Joel, who insisted unconscious Lydia was dead. Following an initial round of questioning with feds, Clayton suffers a considerable mishap. Readers learn that Joel is indeed alive and has been living under another name with his mistress all these years. It turns out maintaining his new identity, as well as the illicit millions in his offshore accounts, may necessitate killing to keep people quiet. As one of those people has mob connections, Joel is soon evading the Mafia along with authorities who connect him to recent homicides. But it’s a jailbreak with two dangerous convicts that exacerbates Joel’s predicament in a way he can neither predict nor easily allay. Spitalli writes well-detailed, exciting set pieces, like when a wounded Lydia faces alligators in the swamp with little more than a flare gun. Similarly, despite the baddie’s despicability, his having to stay ahead of Mafia types and nosy cops maintains a persistently intense narrative. Nevertheless, a smart but repetitive subplot of Jane’s fighting a clear case of sexual harassment nearly overwhelms the story. Things pick up, though, once the convicts enter the fray, and an outlandish plot turn energizes the final act.
A mostly riveting tale of a frantic criminal on the run. (author’s note, author bio)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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