An entertaining suspense yarn about complicated, success-driven women.
A New York City journalist investigates the duplicitous founder of a Silicon Valley biotech startup on the eve of its initial public offering in this contemporary novel.
At a conference in Manhattan, 28-year-old BusinessBerry journalist Jamie Roman alerts speaker Anna Bright, the 34-year-old founder of BrightLife—a California company developing BrightSpot, an intraocular biosensor lens with robust capabilities—that she has a hot mic after leaving the stage. Appreciative, Anna asks Jamie to do the BusinessBerry interview that Jamie’s boss was set to do and invites her on her private flight back to the West Coast. Anna, suffering from a headache, sleeps through the trip, but she reschedules the interview for after the weekend, allowing Jamie to spend time with Anna’s attractive assistant, Ian, and overhear gossip that BrightSpot isn’t ready for market. The narrative alternates between the women’s third-person perspectives as both handle challenges: Jamie, in addition to her reporting, competes with a male colleague for a promotion and deals with her estranged Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist father, and Anna keeps the truth from her board of directors and pushes employees to fix issues ahead of BrightLife’s looming IPO. As Jamie pursues a new investigative piece on BrightLife, her boss and, surprisingly, her father warn her to back off. Fans of the Hulu streaming miniseries The Dropout, about the scandal involving biotech company Theranos, will enjoy this page-turner by Schnall, who often concludes her characters’ sections with provocative cliffhanger teasers (“I don’t want to be the whistleblower—not because I don’t want to help you but because I know someone who knows way more than I do”). The author infuses a lot of fun and flavor into the narrative, as when griping employees call BrightSpot “BS,” and she gives Anna sympathetic shadings, despite her behind-the-scenes actions. Jamie, too, is a well-developed character beyond her reporting on BrightLife.
Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781684632527
Page Count: 344
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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