Warm, cozy yuletide fare.
A brokenhearted man sees no reason to live in this Christmas tale of hope and healing.
In 2014, Paul Wanless and his wife, Rachel, attend a Christmas pageant in which their 7-year-old son, Jaxon, plays one of the Wise Men. Paul drives home separately and learns that his beloved family has just been killed by a drunk driver. Three years later, Paul, a diabetic, decides to end his life with whiskey and insulin. But a stranger named Gabriel invites himself into the house and persuades Paul that he needs to keep living. Gabriel—surely the angel—shows up at several pivotal moments, just long enough to save Paul from complete disaster. “Sometimes the path to heaven begins in hell,” Gabriel says. Later, Paul meets a sweet widow named Collette, and the attraction is mutual. But he endures a deep reservoir of pain that might make it impossible to get on with his life. She, too, has suffered loss, having witnessed her husband die from ALS. Then one day, Paul rescues 9-year-old Ronald from a beating several bullies are giving him outside of school. Ronald’s divorced mother stays home drinking herself into a stupor, and his father is out of the picture, so Paul tries to help the boy as much as a non-relative can. Three sympathetic characters, three broken lives—can they ever recover? And if Paul were to fall in love again, would that betray Rachel? An answer will come, but first, people must see through their pain and hurt to get to the other side. Now Christmas is fast approaching, and Paul had been an avid “Christmasphile” until his tragedy. The three characters’ storylines weave a holiday tapestry culminating—when else?—on a snowy Christmas Day. Indeed, all the story elements come together in a bright, neat bow as though left under the tree by Santa. There are a few eye-rollers having to do with Paul’s generosity, as well as a fact that would be a spoiler to reveal. Gabriel is believable, though. He’s just an angel doing his job.
Warm, cozy yuletide fare.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668014905
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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