A riveting story of family and the unease of harboring dark secrets.
A painter who’s been hiding herself and her daughter for years plots revenge in Murphy’s psychological thriller.
It’s 1968, and teen Blue Lake has changed towns nearly 10 times in the last six years. Blue isn’t even her real name; she and her mother, Scarlet, pick new names for every move. All this time, Scarlet has been running from “HIM,” a mysterious man who apparently keeps tracking down the mother and daughter. Blue calls HIM the Shadow Man, but she’s never seen this person, nor his distinctive black Cadillac. She’s tired of constantly moving and ready to settle down, and South Haven, Michigan, seems as good a place as any. She quickly makes a friend, stumbles into potential romance, and hones her already sharp piano skills. But Scarlet didn’t randomly choose South Haven as their latest refuge—it’s where she plans to mete out vengeance, which entails appointments with psychoanalyst Dr. Henry Williams. It’s a plan that could have profound consequences for both herself and Blue. The author has crafted a quietly suspenseful tale—readers know from the beginning the startling thing Scarlet has planned while Henry, in alternating first-person narratives, digs into the past to learn all he can about his curious, deliberately vague new patient. The mother and daughter have their own narrative voices and share a complex dynamic; Blue feels the mother she loves is “suffocating” her, and Scarlet worries her maturing daughter is “less agreeable” than she once was. A string of mysteries further bolsters the tension as Scarlet begins exhibiting signs of paranoia and schizophrenia (has she really seen the black Cadillac?). This engrossing book’s latter half delivers surprises all the way to the end with a strikingly oppressive atmosphere lingering throughout, from the unrelenting winter snow in the opening chapters to the Lakes’ run-down house in South Haven.
A riveting story of family and the unease of harboring dark secrets.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 9780593183465
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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