A vibrant manor tale with a striking protagonist who is a bit too perfect.
A California heiress with a doctorate heads to her ancestral home in this debut novel.
Gemma Alexandra Lancaster Phillips has recently finished her doctoral dissertation but is hesitant to accept a professorship, wondering if there’s something more she can do. After catching her boyfriend, Michael West, kissing another woman shortly after graduation, the Malibu-based daughter of famous actress Jillian Phillips—and an American-born descendant of British royalty—receives an invitation to help her cousin Evan Lancaster, the eighth marquess of Kentshire. Evan must ready Cherrywood Hall, the family home in England, for a life-changing competition. The winner will serve as the location for a major new television series, Castlewood Manor, which will lead to a significant boost for Cherrywood Hall’s vineyard and outreach opportunities to the local community. Gemma soon fits right in, putting her doctorate to use in digging up family history in the form of hidden diaries and wardrobes; falling head over heels for Evan’s best friend and business partner, Kyle Williams; and feeling a special connection to Pippa, her dead great-great-aunt, who saved Cherrywood Hall from ruin in the early 20th century and whose glamorous, renegade spirit is still present in every corner of the estate. Unfortunately, the fun is soon tinged with mystery as competing estate owners begin dying under strange circumstances—everything from sudden car accidents to tea-party strychnine poisoning—and Gemma sets out to save Cherrywood Hall once and for all. In this lucid series opener, Barton isn’t sparing with delicious details about the beautiful family estate, Pippa’s extensive and gorgeous collection of dresses, and the countless meals and teas prepared by the resident butler for Gemma and her friends and family. Fans of TV shows like Downton Abbey will no doubt be drawn in by the “everything old is new again” escapist fantasy of Gemma’s vivid and entertaining adventures in bucolic England. But Gemma never displays any faults or vulnerabilities. She’s tall, blond, and stunning as well as wealthy, intelligent, and charming, and nearly everyone falls in love with her on first meeting. If Gemma were a little less perfect and a little more relatable, the story would be more effective and enjoyable.
A vibrant manor tale with a striking protagonist who is a bit too perfect.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984195-82-1
Page Count: 292
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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