Abbott is the queen of charged atmospheres, where a restrained surface often hides a torrent of deception.
Three sisters suffering from Detroit’s auto industry collapse are drawn to a shiny new business opportunity that turns sinister.
Abbott’s latest opens with a sense of foreboding—a feeling synonymous with Abbott and one that only grows as the hardships of three suburban Detroit women come to light. The Bishop sisters—Debra, Pam, and Harper—are resilient, but they rely on one another after the collapse of the auto industry creates a trickle-down effect of loss in their family. First, their father loses his job and dies not long after. Pam marries rich and loses it all in a divorce. Debra, the eldest, loses her strong facade as the stress of medical debt from her husband’s cancer wears her down. And Harper feels her sense of control unraveling as a secret debt bears down on her and threatens to dismantle her relationships. When Pam’s son leaves for college—“Somehow, Pam had gotten him out”—she feels proud but unmoored. How will she pay for tuition? Harper is very aware of Pam’s struggles, so when she returns from a short-term job in another town and finds her sister beaming from the front seat of a new car, things don’t add up. Pam tells Harper about the Wheel, a group of women helping women. Harper at first sees the Wheel as the pyramid scheme it is, but when she shares her concerns with Debra, she finds Debra is also drinking the wine-spiked Kool-Aid. Unwilling to tell her sisters the grim nature of her debts—“Secrets came naturally to her. She’d kept them all her life”—Harper soon finds herself deep in the Wheel, recruiting other desperate women with the allure of sisterhood and fortune. “Money isn’t about money. It’s about security, freedom, independence, a promise of wholeness.” Before long, the champagne bubbles start to pop, and Pam, the most popular woman of the Wheel, starts to feel the pressure, and with it, some very warranted paranoia. Harper outlines her sister’s downfall in a detached tone that reads as coming from a place of authentic trauma—she remembers the small details, her observations methodical—but it causes the mounting pressure to fizzle out with an impression of inevitability.
Abbott is the queen of charged atmospheres, where a restrained surface often hides a torrent of deception.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780593084960
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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