Come for the missing person mystery, stay for the existential ennui.
When her friend Peter goes missing, Andy digs up long-buried secrets from their teenage years to find him.
The year was 1996, and Andy’s neglectful mother was sure the apocalypse was nigh. Andy; her boyfriend, Marcus; her best friend, Peter; and their other friend, Em, decide to break into an abandoned manor and pretend that the world really is ending and that they can therefore do whatever they want without consequence. At the manor they meet David, a mysterious boy about their age whose enigmatic presence pits Peter and Andy against each other, vying for David’s attention. When they hear a story about a diamond necklace supposedly hidden somewhere on the property, Em buys a fake necklace that they take turns hiding and searching for, a ritual they simply call “the game.” Twenty years later, Andy hears from Peter’s mother that Peter has gone missing. Andy goes digging back into their past in an attempt to find some clue that might lead her to Peter, but she finds more mysteries than she bargained for. Though it’s Peter’s disappearance that sets off the events that lead Andy to unpack her youth, this book isn’t exactly a thriller. The elements of mystery serve to provide narrative tension, but the real point here is Gosling’s examination of the disappointment of modern living, the emptiness of adulthood, and the notion of the fake diamond necklace so many of us spend our lives searching for. The ending doesn’t quite satisfy, and a few of the passages on contemporary culture fall flat—for example, saying that Tinder is superficial is not much of an observation at this point. But Andy’s search for her friend works well as a scaffolding for some lovely passages, like Andy’s thoughts on the online trend of “unboxing” videos: “And every time, when the moment finally came, I wondered if the hundreds of thousands of other people who watched these videos felt the same as I did, the same anticipation, the same surprise, and ultimately the same disappointment—that what was inside the box was just a thing.”
Come for the missing person mystery, stay for the existential ennui.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-75915-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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
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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