A delightful celebration of rom-coms, slasher flicks, and the women who love them.
Leading Lady or Final Girl? That’s the question in this delightful debut.
Film student Jamie Prescott is struggling with her dissertation—titled “All’s Fair in Love and Gore: The Intersection of Romantic Comedies and Slasher Films in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries”—when her roommate and BFF, Laurie Hamilton, insists that she take a break and get ready for the singles event they’re supposed to attend. Jamie doesn’t expect she’ll meet the man of her dreams while speed dating at a club in Bed-Stuy, but she does her hair, spends some time choosing a good dress, and puts on a pair of heels, anyway. She really doesn’t expect she’ll spend the evening trapped in a locked-room murder mystery in which a knife-wielding psycho is picking off hopeful singles one by one. If she had, she probably would have chosen more sensible shoes. And maybe a dress with pockets. As the resident expert on horror tropes, Jamie serves as advisor to a dwindling company of surviving speed daters, while the coolheaded and obnoxiously good-looking (of course) Wes serves as leader. As the night progresses, though, Jamie starts to wonder if she’s working with the wrong tropes. What if this killer’s bloody spree is inspired by, say, Lloyd Dobler with the boombox, not Ghostface with the hunting knife (or Jason Voorhees with the machete, or Michael Myers with the kitchen knife, or Freddy Krueger with those knife fingers)? Jamie likes to call her more cerebral, less emotive bestie an “elitist piece of shit,” and Jamie’s creator is, herself, engaging in some fancy metatextual shenanigans here, but Thompson wears her smartypants well. She clearly understands not just the demands of genre but also its pleasures. Those who are familiar with romance and/or horror will have some guesses about how this narrative is going to turn out, but Thompson does an admirable job of keeping the reader guessing—and second-guessing—right up until the end.
A delightful celebration of rom-coms, slasher flicks, and the women who love them.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668206713
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.
Best friends confront feelings for each other when they take a honeymoon trip together.
Francesca Gardiner and George Saint James have always been best friends—just like Jo and Laurie from Little Women, which they both love. Frankie has a big, complicated family and George was the boy next door who’d moved in with his eccentric grandmother. Their friendship survived childhood, awkward teenage years, and living together as young adults without ever venturing into the romantic—well, except for one kiss, but they don’t talk about that. When Frankie gets engaged to an older professor named Nate, George isn’t happy and a huge fight ensues. Despite his misgivings, George shows up to be her best man, but Nate leaves Frankie right before the wedding with only a cryptic letter. Devastated, Frankie goes to a friend’s house to recuperate, but her honeymoon is already planned and paid for—so she decides to travel to Tofino, a picturesque town on the coast of Vancouver Island, with George taking Nate’s place. Frankie wants to fix her friendship with George, but now that they’re in a romantic suite in a beautiful location, things are more complicated than ever. She’d always thought a relationship would be a bad idea, but she’s slowly beginning to realize they’ll never be able to go back to being kids. Maybe the only way forward involves forging a new kind of relationship. Fortune, the author of romances like This Summer Will Be Different (2024), returns with another love story full of longing and intense angst. The many allusions to Little Women are charming, and Frankie is a delightfully headstrong, feisty character. She and George have explosive chemistry, and Fortune manages to make the “will-they-or-won’t-they” nature of their relationship feel like life-or-death stakes.
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593953242
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
