An intriguing but rambling tale about a woman and a psychopath.
A vulnerable woman falls into the predatory clutches of a smooth-talking physician in this novel.
When Mary fatefully meets Dr. Drake Lucifer Bates, she muses: “The name ‘Drake’ makes me think of a dragon. Oh no! ‘Lucifer’ I know from my faith, and it reminds me of the fallen angel sent to hell by God. The devil? Holy cow! Goosebumps run chillingly along my spine, but I don’t know if they are good ones or bad ones.” At the time, she is a “fragile personality”—her marriage of more than 20 years to her husband, Paul, seems destined for divorce, the result of his deceitful infidelity. She is also suffering from terrible chronic pain in the aftermath of back surgery. When Mary encounters Drake at his clinic in Spain, her original impressions are contradictory—on the one hand, he is monstrously inappropriate, unabashedly flirtatious and visibly aroused by her. But she is drawn to his “spicy body,” his empathy, and charisma. She wonders if he can save her from a life of emotional disappointments: “For me, he’s the genuine dream of a man, a spellbinding phantom of my shining white saviour on a white rescue horse.” But she begins to detect the “deep darkness of his evil agenda” and his rampant dishonesty and even starts to suspect he is a sociopath. Drake turns out to be a malicious “puppet master” and not only uses Mary for sexual exploitation, but also convinces her to leave her husband, all the while bilking tens of thousands of dollars from her.
Stark’s entire novel is written in the style of a memoir, with Mary serving as both protagonist and narrator, conveying her lament with breathless melodrama assisted by an infinite arsenal of exclamation points. The author is at her best exploring the way an intelligent, even skeptical woman could be so thoroughly deceived by such a clumsy, transparent huckster. But the plot is meanderingly ill disciplined and often reads like an interminable, furious jeremiad. Mary complains for pages and pages in the most hyperventilated register about her woes, and that is essentially the crux of the tale. There is no element of suspense—Mary announces from the beginning that Drake is a con man and she is his dupe. Still, the weakest feature of Stark’s book, the first installment of a trilogy, is the writing, which seems pitched at one tone—screaming. Here, Mary is about to succumb to Drake’s incessant advances: “Shame on me! I’m a dead drunken fish on his hook! In my half-drunk condition, I’ve left my brain in the last glass of whisky. Oops! I know I must say no, but I’m only human and have desires! So, I’m about to fall right into his cunning, sexy plan to seduce me, as his gentle caresses [sic] and while he speaks sensitive words in my ears.” As a result, this is an exhausting story—the author’s prose exacts a heavy toll on readers who make it to the end of the work.
An intriguing but rambling tale about a woman and a psychopath.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-459360-3
Page Count: 348
Publisher: XlibrisUK
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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