A smart, complex domestic thriller.
A mother and daughter find new appreciation and understanding for each other when their lives are threatened.
When New York University student Cleo shows up at her mother Katrina’s Park Slope house for dinner, she finds signs of a struggle—and her mother’s shoe covered in blood. Mother and daughter had been estranged since Katrina interfered in Cleo’s relationship with a white-collar drug dealer, but Cleo instantly snaps into action, determined to find her mother. Aided by a sympathetic cop and hindered by her lackadaisical father (who’s separated from her mother), Cleo investigates her mom’s computer as well as her place of business. Katrina had always led Cleo to believe she was a patent attorney, but it turns out she was a fixer for wealthy and powerful people. She was also, in her youth, an abandoned child who lived at Haven House until she was adopted at the age of 14. Cleo finds her mother’s journal from those years and feels appalled—and guilty—to read about the abuse her mother endured. As Cleo is drawn deeper and deeper into the details of her mother’s life and disappearance, she herself may be in danger. McCreight alternates first-person chapters about Cleo’s search with chapters in Katrina’s voice about the days leading up to her disappearance, and also includes the occasional transcript of a therapy session, journal entry, or legal document connected to one of Katrina’s big cases. The build-up is extremely well paced and effective, created brick by suspenseful brick. No one, of course, is who they seem. Eventually the two main narratives converge in a somewhat flat climax—but most of the loose threads are satisfactorily tied up. Both Katrina and Cleo are tough as nails and vulnerable as hell, which makes it easy to root for them both against all the forces of (mostly masculine) evil they have to combat.
A smart, complex domestic thriller.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536421
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
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