This cautionary tale feels like it was written expressly to be adapted into a made-for-TV movie.
A whirlwind romance between two 30-something Manhattanites turns dangerous when wrath rears its ugly head.
Chastity Jeffries doesn’t have time for love. The 34-year-old attorney has just moved back home to New York City from Atlanta for a cushy job at the Divorce Concierge and she’s more interested in building her career than dating. Besides, after a childhood marred by watching her basketballer-turned-preacher father, Kareem, cheat on her mother, Sisley, Chastity’s outlook on relationships is not exactly rosy. That is, until she meets Xavier King. He seems like a dream come true—tall, dark, and handsome, he’s a successful attorney with a penchant for big romantic gestures. But this is a story about wrath, and Xavier embodies it. His adolescence was filled with physical and verbal abuse at the hands of his grandmother, and that trauma has manifested in adult Xavier’s own violent outbursts. When his fiancee, Roxanne, walks out on him, Xavier refuses to take his best friend Bryce’s advice to talk to a professional about his rage, throwing himself into his new relationship with Chastity instead. But when it becomes increasingly difficult to control his emotions, it's only a matter of time before Xavier’s perfect facade comes crashing down. The author expertly builds ominous tension, dropping several red flags as Xavier’s lying, gaslighting, manipulation, and fury are revealed slowly. But multiple flashback scenes are awkwardly inserted, interrupting the sinister buildup. Readers who don't enjoy overt religious themes in their fiction may bristle at many of Chastity’s ideas about her relationship, particularly that Xavier’s anger issues are the reason God brought them together. And while the parablelike climax is expected, it wraps up with swift, almost biblical justice in a way that real-life domestic violence rarely does.
This cautionary tale feels like it was written expressly to be adapted into a made-for-TV movie.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982142-92-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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