Perfect reading for those who wonder: “If you couldn’t trust your best friend, could you really trust anyone?”
A self-celebratory party for the West Hollywood Moms’ Club leads swiftly to “a real-life game of Clue that nobody said they wanted to play.”
Although two of their pampered number, Natasha and Colleen, are distinctly minor players, four members of “the six”—Brooke Lyons, Kiersten McCann, Whitney Gilmore, and Jade Porter—are about as tight as friends can be. They’ve lived in close proximity, confided in each other about their husbands (along with Brooke’s wife, attorney Abby Blackman), and gone through pregnancy and childbirth in such lockstep fashion that Kiersten decides it’s high time for them to enjoy a girl’s night in at her place. The festivities end abruptly when Natasha finds Kiersten floating in her pool, bashed to death, as an autopsy will show, before she hit the water. Most of her surviving friends don’t spend long wondering whodunit before telling Det. Perez of the Beverly Hills P.D. that it was probably Brooke, whose recent history of instability is promptly amped up when Abby, who’s found another woman, decides that she’s too dangerous to have custody of their son, Julian, and snatches the 6-month-old away. As Whitney, Kiersten’s best friend since kindergarten, struggles to hide her husband Colin’s gambling addiction, and Jade hides the news that her own husband, Ryan, has been laid off by DreamWorks, Berry digs deeper and deeper into this dysfunctional quasi-family until it becomes clear that these women are lying about everything—absolutely everything—to each other and themselves.
Perfect reading for those who wonder: “If you couldn’t trust your best friend, could you really trust anyone?”Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781662512605
Page Count: 287
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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