The darkness runs deep in this skillfully plotted chiller.
A documentarian gets more than she bargains for when she chooses remote Blackwood Bay as the location of her next film.
Alexandra Young’s harrowing first film, Black Winter, won her accolades, but her second film was a failure, and she needs another hit or her career may be in jeopardy. Alex wants to document what life is like in a small village in the north of England by asking people to send in their own footage, which she would then curate. She secures funding, and the people who hold the purse strings coax her into choosing Blackwood Bay, where she spent a troubled childhood, as her subject. She wouldn't have chosen it herself, but with her career on the line, she agrees. It’s also made clear that she’s to look into the suicide of 15-year-old Daisy Willis,who plunged off a cliff to her death a decade ago. Daisy’s body was never found, but suicide was a foregone conclusion. Then, seven years later, Zoe Pearson, another teen, went missing. After the project is announced to Blackwood Bay citizens, the video clips started pouring in. However, to properly look into the disappearances, Alex must travel to Blackwood Bay. She does have faint memories of the town, but now it’s as if she’s “seeing it through a filter, a distorting prism.” As she gathers footage and probes the residents, it’s clear that some people don’t believe Daisy killed herself and that the incident could be connected to Zoe’s disappearance. Alex doesn’t quite see how the two could be related, but she does sense an insidious rot lingering under the coastal town’s quaint facade. When another teen girl goes missing, the town is looking for someone to blame, and no one is safe, not even Alex. Before she knows it, Alex is no longer a passive observer: She’s part of the story. Watson gradually turns up the heat while carefully teasing out wicked secrets that the town would rather keep buried, and Alex, who has her own secrets, makes an appealing, if possibly unreliable, narrator.
The darkness runs deep in this skillfully plotted chiller.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06238-215-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.
When one woman takes on another’s identity to uncover a crime, they both become suspects in a murder.
Aubrey Price and Camille Bayliss come from different worlds, only crossing paths because of the discovery that Camille’s husband, powerful lawyer Ben Bayliss, is hiding something terrible that affects them both. As the novel opens, Aubrey is driving Camille’s Range Rover, then teetering into a bar on Camille’s high heels, with Camille’s dress and credit cards and a wig that mimics Camille’s hair, pretending to be her because Ben tracks his wife’s every move and expenditure, and Camille wants to create a smokescreen while she sneaks into his office in search of evidence of that unnamed secret. But the scheme goes awry, and the women become each other’s alibis after Camille finds Ben murdered in their home. The first part of the book builds suspense and misdirection well, with Aubrey and Ben’s straight-arrow partner, Hank Landry, serving as first-person observers in some chapters while others track Camille. She’s a wealthy and privileged woman but not a happy one, stuck under the thumbs of her husband and her tyrannical father, Randall Everett, who pretty much runs their small Louisiana town. Aubrey was orphaned as a teen when her parents died in a car crash and has proudly fended for herself ever since, coming to depend on her four roommates, who have become friends. But as the cast of characters grows, it seems as if almost everyone in town has a motive for killing Ben, and the piling up of suspects and movements among different timelines can sometimes be confusing. And it all comes to a frustrating end when, after a whole school of red herrings, the solution to Ben’s murder arrives out of far left field.
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593834459
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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