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
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
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