A flawed but entrancing thriller set in a small-town Oregon.
A washed-up lawyer stumbles upon a missing persons case in Jackson’s debut thriller.
Jacksonville, Oregon, seemed like the perfect place for Braxton Hayward to drink away his misery (he’s suffering from a failed marriage, a ruined law career, and bankruptcy) and try his hand at writing. In the weeks since he moved to the small, rustic town, however, he’s been haunted by hallucinations: An unseen voice repeats the mysterious phrase, “In Terra Lios,” and a group of ghostly bodies hangs suspended from the branches of a tree. Braxton tries to brush them off as drunken dreams, but things start to feel a lot more real when a family of three—the local art gallery owner Elle Harris, her police officer fiancé, and young son—abruptly disappears from town. As law enforcement and the media descend on the area to search for the missing trio, Braxton, who met Elle recently and once dreamed of joining the FBI, can’t help but get invested in the case…especially after bumping into the very attractive FBI agent Riley McAvoy, who has come down from Portland to work it. Elle’s 3-year-old son soon turns up alive, but not his parents. What’s more, a second couple goes missing as well. His lawyerly intuition reawakened, Braxton digs into the mystery, which seems to involve a long-standing rivalry between two prominent families in Jacksonville. The question is, are Elle and her fiancé dead, or have they simply run away? And if they have run away, what are they running from? As Braxton discovers unusual connections between himself and some of the major players, he may have to turn the question back on himself: What exactly is Braxton running from? And can learning the fate of Elle Harris help him to face it?
Jackson’s understated but fluid prose pulls the reader along with Braxton into the shifting center of the case. “Inside, the atmosphere was abuzz,” he notices, striding into the town’s bar the morning after the disappearances. “People huddled around the wooden tables, their conversations a mix of speculation and concern. Braxton caught fragments as he navigated his way to an open stool: ‘Could it be something sinister?’ ‘What if they just ran off together?’ ‘She seemed so grounded.’” Braxton is a slightly unsympathetic protagonist, perhaps to a greater degree than the author means for him to be—he’s an alcoholic mostly lacking in charm or humor or even a notably tragic backstory. (His divorce was amicable; his bankruptcy was due to him being forced to cover the legal fees of a school district that beat him in court.) The plot is filled with little unearned coincidences, and none of the supporting characters are terribly complex. Even so, there’s a stickiness to the mystery, and to Braxton’s sincere attraction to it, which retroactively deepens the impact of his initial purposelessness. The setting is richly rendered, charming by daylight but thoroughly sinister in the night. The ending probably precludes further cases following Braxton the lawyer-detective, but readers will be eager to discover what future intrigues Jackson may have up his sleeve.
A flawed but entrancing thriller set in a small-town Oregon.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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