A surprising ending and well-done dialogue make this a perfectly good way to spend a night or two.
A British woman goes missing in Nigeria in this solid thriller.
Nicole Oruwari has lived in Lagos, Nigeria, for seven years, but she’s never really felt quite at home. The Black British woman moved to the city with her husband, Tonye, where they planned to raise their two sons in the palatial home of Tonye’s family. Nicole is a member of the Nigerwives, a group of foreign women in the city married to Nigerian men, and most of her social life revolves around the organization’s parties, seminars, and fundraisers. When one of her friends from the group suddenly leaves the country, Nicole withdraws and starts showing signs of depression: “The days went quickly and then not quickly enough….The hours passed in a haze. It didn’t seem to matter whether she stayed in bed or not.” Her relationship with Tonye begins to sour after she discovers bondage gear in his suitcase and a hotel receipt in his blazer; he gaslights her, and she eventually starts seeing a man named Elias—then she disappears after a boat trip. Enter Nicole’s estranged Auntie Claudine, a Londoner who flies to Lagos determined to track her niece down. She finds Tonye, his family, and the police unhelpful and suspicious, and Nicole’s friends fail to ease her mind with pronouncements like “All I’ll say is people in Lagos are not what you think. Everyone is hiding behind a façade that matters more than the truth. We play our roles too well.” But every blind alley and dodged question make her more determined to find out what happened to her niece. Walters is gifted at building suspense, and the novel’s ending is legitimately surprising. Her prose is fine, but her dialogue—sometimes funny—is the novel’s real treat. This is a more than competent thriller; it’s not earth-shattering, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a satisfying thriller that works on its own terms.
A surprising ending and well-done dialogue make this a perfectly good way to spend a night or two.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781668011089
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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