A snappy, exhilarating first installment in a genre-bending series.
Manchester’s series-starter mixes a crime thriller with elements of time-travel SF.
When readers are introduced to Blake Everhart, she is reeling over the murder of her brother and grappling with her recent suspension from the U.S. Marshals for punching a fellow deputy. In need of an agent with her particular skill set, Blake’s superiors call her back into action to help resecure an especially dangerous fugitive named Robert Canton. The convoy transporting him goes awry, and after a pulse-pounding action scene in which Blake dispatches a crooked cop and nearly recaptures Canton, he escapes into the woods. Acting fast, Blake organizes a search and is provided with a new team—but this one comes with a “monitor” named Rivas, who’s there to make sure Blake doesn’t go off the rails again. They track Canton to the small town of Pacific, Tennessee, where Blake seeks answers at the hospital where he was treated. Once there, she is drugged by Thomas Lancaster, a doctor sympathetic to Canton, only to wake up and discover she has traveled back in time—or “pivoted,’” as the title has it—to earlier that morning, giving her the chance to “do-over” her decisions of the last few hours. Returning to the hospital, she makes an unlikely ally of Dr. Naomi Preston, who happens to be Lancaster’s ex-wife. The narrative then proceeds much in the way stories in this genre often do, with Blake discovering a criminal enterprise far larger and more sinister than anything she had previously imagined. While the plot certainly isn’t groundbreaking, it moves at a pace that makes the novel compulsively readable, and Manchester’s vivid rendering of Pacific evokes a sort of cloistered small-town setting that provides a welcome juxtaposition to the requisite action (“walking trails slither through Sugar Creek Park with the occasional wooden bench. Battered and damp, the sign pointing out each trail barely resists the punishing weather. Deserted, the disc golf course glistens under the rain as the chains rattle with each gust”). Blake herself may have some tropey characteristics, but she displays enough individuality to carry the action in these pages with aplomb.
A snappy, exhilarating first installment in a genre-bending series.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 9781966920021
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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