An atmospheric, chilling, and riveting ghost story that’s perfect for Halloween.
In this horror novel, a dream house turns into a nightmare when a woman encounters a spirit.
Nora Bliss and her beloved husband, Dex, are living a comfortable life in Washington, D.C. But when Nora barely avoids being hit by a train, they decide it is time to leave the big city to enjoy the safety of idyllic, small-town living. Little do they know that they will confront an entirely new trial when the plot they buy—lot 16 of a larger property called Windy Hill Farm in Boulder, Pennsylvania—turns out to be the site of a haunting and other unexplained phenomena. The ordeal starts slowly, with Nora experiencing disarming and increasingly dangerous brushes with the ghost of a teenage girl. The apparition tries to communicate with Nora, leaving the message “FIND THEM” written across surfaces. Convinced that the ghost needs her help and against Dex’s more pragmatic take, Nora starts to investigate the history of the farm, delving into local lore, archives, and the diaries of members of the prestigious Williams family, which once owned the property. She eventually finds that the spirit may well be linked to the 70-year-old cold case of a vanished girl. Ash’s haunted house tale/murder mystery is a moody, melancholic, slow-burning story peppered with genuinely terrifying moments and classic horror elements, including jump scares and the use of a Ouija board. Other standout facets are Nora’s close relationship with her sister, Madeline, and the protagonist’s resolute, self-imposed mission to solve the case and save her home: “My days of being immobilized in the face of danger were gone. My determination was fierce. The only unknown was if my newfound resolve could prevail over spirits from the afterlife. The living versus the dead.” The novel runs a bit long, with a protracted resolution, and some readers may question the nonchalant acceptance of ghosts and the paranormal displayed by every character when told about Nora’s experiences. Still, the tale is a gripping, scary read.
An atmospheric, chilling, and riveting ghost story that’s perfect for Halloween.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 979-8218218041
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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