A taut thriller that examines the twin legacies of trauma and grief.
With her second novel, the author of Darling Rose Gold (2020) brings more multi-point-of-view fun to thriller fans.
When a mysterious emailer threatens to reveal her darkest secret, Natalie Collins journeys from Boston to an isolated island off the Maine coast to confess the truth to her flighty younger sister, Kit. Kit has spent the last six months at Wisewood, a self-improvement retreat that requires attendees to give up all connections, including contact with friends and family and all forms of physical affection. When Nat shows up, the other residents of Wisewood refuse to give Nat any information about Kit, citing rules which prevent friends or family members from attending together. While her sister turns out to be an elusive presence on the island, Nat can't shake the feeling that someone is tailing her. With a blizzard coming in to prevent all travel back to the mainland and Wisewood staff growing increasingly hostile toward her, Nat's racing against a ticking clock to accomplish her mission and get back to her normal life. Although the genre-savvy will see the twists coming from miles away, Wrobel manages to keep the lines of her narrative pulled taut here. The narrator's torch passes among Natalie, Kit, and a third woman who goes unidentified until the novel's midpoint. Through flashbacks to a childhood and adolescence spent trapped in her abusive father's unhinged training regimen—one designed to purge fear and self-doubt from the girl and her sister—this third narrator's story quickly proves to be the novel's most captivating thread. Unfortunately, because neither Nat nor Kit shares her story with the same immediacy or intimacy as this counterpart, readers will inevitably feel a deeper connection to the long-unnamed woman. Once her identity is revealed, however, they'll be left to wonder if that wasn't the point all along.
A taut thriller that examines the twin legacies of trauma and grief.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-10011-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.
An epic battle between good and evil with a mystic twist.
When she was 10, Vida visited a fortuneteller who presented her with two broadly different futures and prophesied that she’d be “a champion of the natural world and all its beauty.” Now Vida, raised by her late great-uncle Ogden in a remote cabin surround by the beauties of nature, has no fear of wild animals, including the wolves led by her friend Lupo. Taught by Ogden, Vida, who has a special talent for dredging up gemstones, makes a living by means of a placer mine in a nearby river on government land. Her lover, school principal and activist José Nochelobo, dies in what seems to be an accident but turns out to have been murder. Terrence Boschvark, a wealthy psychopath who’ll stop at nothing to develop some nearby land, is behind the evil doings near her home. Vida, certain that someone is watching her, patiently waits for him to show himself. When he does, he turns out to be deputy sheriff Nash Deacon, who accuses her of killing his cousin Belden Bead and demands that she surrender to him body and soul. Deacon plays a game of sexual terrorism with Vida, who watched his drug-dealing cousin die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and buried him and his car with her uncle’s backhoe. Now she plans for Deacon to be next. Once she kills and buries Deacon and his car, Vida becomes the subject of a manhunt by Boschvark’s remorseless killers. The mystical forces within her lead her to a place of hope. With some help from two native people and a tracker hired to find her, she fights for her life.
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781662500510
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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