A well-paced and creepy novel with a strong message.
A taut psychological thriller set in the eerie remnants of an abandoned asylum.
In 2012,Kyle Hampton leads a happy life with his wife and young daughter, but he’s plagued by memories of his childhood in Rose Hill Asylum, where he was born. There, abuse was rampant, and scores of children died over the years before it was shut down 28 years ago. Many years later, he and his best friend, Randy, a fellow former asylum resident, still find themselves drawn back to the closed-down building, which retains its sinister atmosphere. Lawrence paints these visits vividly, and the asylum itself becomes the work’s most fully realized locale as the friends’ visits become increasingly unsettling. Throughout, the author also successfully intersperses this story with Kyle’s troubling recollections—particularly of his encounters with bullies and of the fact that his younger brother, Roy, was not adopted with him; Kyle escaped the brutal asylum, but his sibling didn’t, leaving him guilt-ridden. There’s an underdeveloped plotline involving Kyle’s difficult relationship with his wife, as well. However, Lawrence also takes readers into the mind of a serial killer known as Stitches—a man who haunts the asylum, dressed as a clown, and currently preys upon local women; as the killer slowly makes his existence known to Kyle, a tense cat-and-mouse game plays out. The author manages to keep the villain shrouded in mystery by carefully unveiling his connections to the asylum over the course of the story. Throughout the novel, including in Stitches’ horrific monologues, the author presents a searing indictment of the mental health and asylum system in the United States over several decades. Action scenes dominate the work’s latter sections, but the novel’s strongest aspects are its forbidding atmosphere and its damning depiction of what happens to kids who fall through cracks in the system.
A well-paced and creepy novel with a strong message.Pub Date: March 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-50-923522-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.
What happens when an eminent mystery novelist collaborates with an award-winning journalist on a spy thriller? Pretty much everything you can imagine.
While food blogger Alice Li is in retreat from her overbearing mother, famous Chinese dissident Vivien Li, in a restaurant bathroom, the alarm goes off. And not just the fire alarm, but every alarm in the city, the country, and around the world. Their triggering is clearly an act of terrorism, and the silencing of all those alarms, which comes as suddenly and inexplicably as their screeching, is anything but reassuring. Vivien spirits her daughter off to the White House, where Grant McAllister, the director of National Intelligence, informs Alice that her friend and fellow blogger Liam Palmer has just been fished from the Hong Kong harbor. McAllister and Alan Zhou, head of the China Mission Center, are convinced Liam knew something about those alarms, and President Fraser Pardington is determined to do whatever he can to prevent a sequel. He fails, of course, and the second act of global terrorism is even more disastrous than the first. All the president’s men and women initially believe the threat comes from the Chinese government, and Chinese President Chen Jiayang thinks the Americans might be behind it. Alice and Vivien race around the globe to track down the culprit, and what they find will knit together the fates of Alice’s family, the U.S. and China, and the history of the world as we know it.
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781250412522
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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