A standout Southern family mystery filled with lush settings, dazzling characters, and chilling surprises.
An unexpected death compels a young woman to revisit the dark events of her childhood in Griffith’s eerie family drama.
For 18 years, August Caine has been living in Paris under a different name and trying not to dwell on her past, but an early-morning phone call from Savannah, Georgia, leaves her feeling like the whole world has been turned upside down. August had believed that her beloved aunt Helen was already dead, but the voice from across the ocean delivers a shocking revelation: “Your aunt Helen didn’t die fifteen years ago. She died fifteen minutes ago.” Realizing that her life in Europe with her mentally ill mother has been built on lies, August returns to the mossy cobblestones of Savannah to attend Helen’s funeral and find some answers. When August was a child, her father was murdered at their home in New York City, leaving August’s French mother so distraught that she became mute and agoraphobic. It was then that the boisterous Helen, with her Southern accent so thick it almost sounded fake, stepped in. Helen brought the young August south to Savannah and into a world of wild parties, spooky history, and charming eccentrics. For the first time, August began to feel herself opening up to the world, and she even grew close to the shy neighbor boy, Tommy. But August’s mother whisked her away to Europe, telling her Helen was dead and that the two of them needed to hide for their safety. Returning to Savannah to find Tommy still living next door and Helen’s house largely untouched, August only has questions about why her mother would have lied, why Helen didn’t come after her, and what events leading to her father’s death could have created the need for such secrecy and strife among his survivors.
Griffith’s moody and surprising opening scene will immediately draw readers into August’s unusual and engrossing story. Writing from August’s first-person perspective, the author wraps every description in poignant and elegant prose: “Time twisted and fused into the hum of white engine noise and the murmur of soft voices,” she writes, turning even a simple nap on an airplane into something poetic. The outlandish Helen oozes Southern charm in a way that feels wonderfully idiosyncratic rather than cliched—she grills steaks in T-shirts at formal parties, drives an old hearse, and serves up plenty of genuine wisdom along with her biscuits and gravy. It’s impossible to not want more of her on every page. Griffith cannily keeps the more distressing elements of murder and mental illness lurking around the edges of Helen’s fabulous world to create magnificent tension. Fans of more fast-paced thrillers might grow frustrated with the very slow burn of the mystery at the novel’s center, but readers who lock into the narrative’s sauntering pace will savor every spooky encounter and tiny clue as they inexorably lead to a satisfyingly operatic conclusion.
A standout Southern family mystery filled with lush settings, dazzling characters, and chilling surprises.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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