An engaging novel about a multifaceted investigator who undergoes challenging on-the-job training.
In Diamond’s thriller, a guarded woman slowly opens herself to new possibilities as she deals with a conspiracy.
Thirty-two-year-old Claire Chastain is in a time of transition, which is causing her to run from commitment. Specifically, she’s run away from live-in boyfriend Peter,who made the mistake of thinking about proposing to her. She leaves her high-powered finance job in New York City and returns home to Washington, D.C., where she takes an accounting position for which she’s overqualified. She ostensibly came back to help her cantankerous grandmother Leonamove into an assisted living facility, but Claire’s new life becomes unduly complicated. For one, she’s being followed by a huge man in a 1971 Lincoln Continental. Then she learns that her paranoid friend Gavin was killed in a strange car accident. Finally, at work, Claire receives an odd spreadsheet, apparently as part of an audit of a pharmaceutical company. She soon finds herself being hunted by shadowy forces—and aided by a most unusual guardian angel. Initially, Diamond, the author of To Hell With Johnny Manic (2019), presents a protagonist whom some readers will find difficult to like. But after the author introduces the bitter Leona and reveals details of Claire’s formative years, readers will sympathize with the protagonist’s prickly nature. Importantly, the author has Claire experience some personal growth; specifically, she realizes that she must change her ways in order to thrive—and nudging her in that new direction is the wounded but gritty veteran that someone has hired to protect her. Diamond does a masterful job of unspooling the conspiracy at the heart of the story, and the quickly changing circumstances force Claire to learn how to improvise. (It certainly helps, however, that the bad guys have hired inept thugs to stalk her.) All through the narrative, Claire moves toward a new life path, and it will be intriguing to watch her develop further in planned future outings.
An engaging novel about a multifaceted investigator who undergoes challenging on-the-job training.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73413-922-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Stolen Time Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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