A delectable and drama-filled thriller.
When a young lawyer takes on a case involving a wealthy Korean American family, she enters a world of deception, seduction, and betrayal.
All Jia Song ever wanted was an Hermès bag. For years after a customer strode into her family’s bodega with that exclusive purse, Jia knew what to work for: “a future kissed by the Midas touch.” The daughter of Korean immigrants, Jia dreamed of a life beyond the bodega where she could provide for her family with ease and buy a mega-expensive purse as an afterthought. At 34, Jia has never been closer to her goal. She’s a junior partner at a prestigious New York City law firm with a senior role already waiting in the wings—barring any mishaps with her newest clients. All that comes between Jia and complete financial security are the Parks, billionaires with a vendetta against their family patriarch. Sora, Suzy, and Minsoo Park are convinced that their father, Chilsoo “Seven” Park, is concealing his wealth and cheating their dying mother, Jeeyun “Jenny” Park, in their divorce settlement. The three siblings, amid incessant bickering, can agree on only one thing: Their father is a scam artist, and they want their mother to live her final days in peace—with justice served. Jenny gives Jia 30 days to uncover Seven’s con, a feat made almost impossible by the Park children’s raging animosity and the way Seven’s spies thwart Jia at every turn. With the help of the Parks’ handsome house manager, Darius Rohani, Jia jets from New York to Seoul, the Cayman Islands to Paris, hoping to find clues about Seven’s funds. In search of her own success by proving the Parks’ suspicions, Jia might be in way over her head. Ahdieh’s debut adult novel is a striking tale of deceit set behind the glamorous facade of Park Avenue’s riches. Jia is a strong heroine with everything to lose but even more to gain, and fans of Crazy Rich Asians, Schitt’s Creek, and White Lotus will get more than their fix of backstabbing and danger.
A delectable and drama-filled thriller.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781250897954
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
