You’ll get lost in the wilds with this gripping debut.
The New Zealand bush is the backdrop in this tale of survival and family secrets.
Half-starved and covered with blood, a young girl stumbles into a grocery store in a remote village on the outskirts of the unforgiving, heavily forested bush. She can’t speak, but she looks just like a girl who went missing in the bush 20 years before. This explosive opener is just the first of many shocking scenes in a nature-centric, highly satisfying crime drama that is perfect for fans of Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010) and other tales of survival. After the girl’s discovery, the plot segues roughly 11,000 miles north to where Effie, the girl who went missing decades before, is working and living on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. Effie doesn’t know the newly found girl, but their shared physical traits—red hair and green eyes—and the community where she was discovered are enough to pull Effie back to the place she hoped she would never see again. Returning to the bush cracks open the story of Effie’s harrowing and heartbreaking childhood of isolation and deprivation, and, as it’s slowly revealed, the story of the girl, whose name is Anya, who has endured far worse. When Anya runs away, Effie must return to the bush to rescue her and in the process discover the fate of her long-missing family and reckon with her past. Rankin deftly reveals Effie’s and Anya’s experiences in parallel storylines that eventually meld into one. Neither Effie nor this novel’s hypnotized readers can be prepared for what she finds. As rich as Rankin’s entrancing and skillfully developed plot are her immersive descriptions of the bush country: “A world of a thousand greens, where trees rose to the sky like gods.” It’s like being there yourself.
You’ll get lost in the wilds with this gripping debut.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798217188093
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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