A touching love story.
A young woman finds love, faith, and freedom when she confronts the painful truth about her past in Bostrom’s novel.
Fisheries biologist Hildy Nybo grew up on her family’s fishing resort on the Elwha River near Olympic National Park in Washington state. She sometimes sees eerie “shadows” others can’t, and, doubting her own mind and memory, keeps detailed diaries and hoards strange keepsakes—stones, feathers, and yard-sale finds. Despite a successful scientific career, she lives like a hermit, with only a canary for company. When Hildy’s offered the dream job of lead project biologist with the ambitious Elwha River restoration project, she must return to the scene of past emotional traumas, including the disappearance of her beloved father when she was 14. Her unstable, hypercritical mother is falling into dementia, and the family business and property will be swept away forever in a couple of years when the Elwha Dam is demolished to allow salmon to return to their ancestral spawning grounds far upstream. Soon after returning home, she meets tall, handsome Luke, a former fisherman turned carpenter and farmer after the tragic deaths of his wife and young daughters on their boat. Luke is entranced by Hildy’s ethereal beauty and gentle spirit, and he patiently coaxes her out of her self-imposed isolation despite her many attempts to rebuff him. Navigating obstacles, sidetracks, misunderstandings, and shocking revelations, they slowly begin to trust in each other. Bostrom’s writing is vivid: Windshield wipers in a rainstorm “whapped like a terrier’s tail”; grieving Luke wears “suffering’s dark cloak.” The author deftly captures the way slight gestures can convey strong feelings and evokes the magnificence of the Olympic peninsula. As the four Bible verses cited before the book’s prologue suggest, Bostrom’s characters express a deeply held Christian faith. Though the trope of two damaged souls finding healing and romance in each other is nothing new, readers will find this version moving and satisfying.
A touching love story.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781496481573
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.
More than a decade after a Georgia man is convicted of a monstrous double murder, an uncomfortably similar crime frees him and resets the search for the guilty party.
In Clifton County, home to the Rich Cliftons and the other Cliftons, the disappearance of teens Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker during the Halloween festivities hits everyone in North Falls hard. Working with her father, Sheriff Gerald Clifton, Deputy Emmy Lou Clifton hears the clock ticking down as she races frantically to get leads on the two friends, who’d been secretly plotting to take off for Atlanta after some undisclosed big score. As a longtime friend of Madison’s mother, Hannah, Emmy hopes against hope to find the missing teens before they’re both dead. By the time Emmy’s hopes are dashed, two unpleasantly likely suspects with strong attachments to underage sex partners have emerged, and one of them ends up in prison. In a bold move, Slaughter jumps over the next 12 years to the case of Paisley Walker, a 14-year-old whose disappearance catches the eye of retiring FBI criminal psychologist Jude Archer, who promptly crosses the country to come to Clifton County and take charge—um, that is, consult—on this heartrending new investigation. Emmy, suddenly and shockingly deprived of counsel from the parents who’ve supported her all her life, doesn’t get along any better with Jude than with the larger circle of Cliftons and the Clifton-Cliftons. But together they identify one new suspect, then another, before a shootout that arrives so early you just know there are still more surprises to come.
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780063336773
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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