A thriller that doesn’t elevate its fascinating core premise.
Across two timelines, a band of friends explores the secrets of an Arkansas hot springs town.
In a town in the Ozarks, there are eight magic houses, each with its own abilities. One house forces visitors to tell the truth, another can slow down time for those inside it, and a third grants powerful luck. The friends spend their senior year of high school hunting for the houses; the eighth and most mysterious they call the Portal House, and they believe it can transport them to the alternate dimension that gives the houses their powers. But their quest ends in tragedy, and most of the group leaves town, presumably for good. Fifteen years later, in 2015, they’re drawn back when one of them—Brandi—disappears. While the rest of the friends found success elsewhere, Brandi stayed in Arkansas, cleaning houses and struggling with an addiction to prescription pills. The book focuses on Jay, a painter constricted by guilt over leaving Brandi, her one-time best friend, behind. There’s also Iggy, a popular quarterback who was once Jay’s lover; Charlie, bookish and wistful; and Max and Hilma, wealthy twins who are outsiders to the town. Finding Brandi is mandatory: The group is bound by an oath they took, given power by one of the houses. The influences of Stephen King, Donna Tartt, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are clear here. Aside from the fantastical houses, which are neither haunted nor quite benevolent, the world of the novel is conventional, and Jay is the only character with depth. At the end, the person who turns out to be the antagonist discusses their actions and motives and then asks: “Is this like at the end of some cheesy movie, where the villain just explains everything to you?” Jay isn’t sure if it’s just a joke, and neither is the reader.
A thriller that doesn’t elevate its fascinating core premise.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780374601775
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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