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
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
Admirably ambitious in scope and mystery.
A small-town sheriff uncovers centuries’ worth of secrets.
Growing up in historic Shereford, New Hampshire, Mandy Grady chafed at being the sheriff’s daughter. After sowing her wild oats in New York for a few years, though, she eventually returned to the tiny town of her youth, and became the new sheriff when her father died. She not only took on his role, but also his obsession with one case he never solved—a case that haunts the town: The disappearance of the entire Dixon family—both parents and four children—during a summer storm in 1998. In the present day, two glamorous, wealthy outsiders, Raquel and Theo Collins, have bought the old Dixon house and are looking to restore it, maybe transform it into a B&B. A stray dog leads them to a gruesome discovery on the property: a well that contains both human bones and a ledger belonging to an 18th-century midwife. Everyone in Shereford knows the old rhyme: “Ding dong bell, the witch is in the well.” Could it be based in truth? Betty and Mason, the enthusiastic heads of the town historical society, connect the ledger to a journal already in their possession and, together with Raquel and a reluctant Mandy, begin to fill in the story. A young woman appeared in Shereford in the midst of a blizzard in the early 18th century. Taking pity, the townsfolk begged her to stay—until babies started dying under her watch, and she was sentenced to death for witchcraft. Now Mandy has to figure out how these ancient sins are related to the more contemporary crimes—because someone in Shereford knows exactly what happened to the Dixons. Gardner deftly juggles a number of characters, plot threads, secrets, time periods, and motives, delivering a satisfyingly layered novel that interrogates the insular lives and histories of small towns.
Admirably ambitious in scope and mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781538765142
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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