Book Review: The Tribes

Title: The Tribes

Author: Mari Howes

Publisher: Dutton

Publication Date: November 3, 2026

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I went into this debut expecting a gripping legal thriller, and I came away with something much darker and heavier. When a panicked woman phones 9-1-1 from a gas station payphone in rural Vermont to report a dead newborn, police charge Heather Garner, a college drop-out and member of the fringe religious community The Messiah's Tribes, with murdering her son. Her family hasn't heard from her in almost twenty years. Lawyer Abby Harris, pregnant with her first child, takes the case over the puzzlement of her friends and colleagues, convinced there's more to the story. As she digs, she begins to suspect the Tribes are less a harmless band of eccentric hippies than a well-organized, exploitative criminal enterprise.

The book alternates between Abby's legal defense investigation and chapters that reveal Heather's past inside the community. It's a sound structure, but the balance is off. The cult chapters take up most of the space, and I found them slow, depressing, and disturbing, and hard to get through. The book opens strongly, but the momentum bogs down quickly. If I hadn't planned to review it, I would have DNF'd before the 20% mark.

Where Howes deserves credit is characterization. Heather in particular is drawn with real depth, and you can feel how thoroughly she has been shaped by her indoctrination. That realism worked against my enjoyment, though. Heather is so deeply brainwashed and so unwilling to step out of the cult that I struggled to root for her, and without a character to cheer for, the slow stretches felt even longer. The ending didn't help. It doesn't land anywhere satisfying, and too many threads are left loose. If you're hoping for a feel-good resolution or a tidy legal payoff, this isn't it.

Overall, this is a well-observed but bleak read that didn't deliver the legal thriller I was hoping for, and I don't recommend it.

A big thank you to Dutton and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#NetGalley #Dutton

Book Review: The Sleeper

Title: The Sleeper

Author: Holly Seddon

Publisher: Atria Books

Publication Date: November 17, 2026

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I love a book that makes you sit with an uncomfortable "what if," and Holly Seddon's alternate-reality thriller does exactly that. Librarian Maya boards her usual sleeper train from Edinburgh to London, but when lightning strikes the carriage she wakes into a London she doesn't recognize — one where the Berlin Wall never fell, the Cold War never ended, and Britain is an authoritarian Soviet state. Her husband Arthur is missing, a stranger is living in her flat, and because her parents never had their gap-year kiss by the wall, Maya herself was never born into this version of the world. Alone and adrift, she falls in with a resistance movement built largely around librarians like her, and gets sent undercover into the government itself, desperate to find her way home and the people she loves along the way.

It's part Cold War spy thriller, part time-travel science fiction, and the blend mostly works, even if the pacing sags somewhat. What I loved most was the doubling of Arthur — one version in Maya's real timeline, one in this Soviet-London reality — set against a single Maya who has to become someone else entirely just to survive.
That contrast does a lot of quiet work, and it's where the book's emotional core really lives. The lightning-strike-as-portal device asks for a fair bit of suspension of disbelief, but I was willing to grant it for the story it unlocks. I did find myself occasionally frustrated by how long Maya goes without picking up the language or customs of the world she's landed in — it stretched credulity a bit for someone this resourceful.

Where the book shines is in its small, telling details of a world with less — parents actually holding their children's hands and talking to them instead of staring at phones, kids clutching dolls and rattles instead of screens, a boy playing spy with real gusto because that's the entertainment he's got. It's a clever way of making the reader question what our own abundance and freedom have cost us. And I loved that libraries end up as the story's literal safe haven — as someone who thinks of libraries as sanctuaries myself, that felt exactly right.

A big thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#NetGalley #AtriaBooks

Book Review: This Jury is Guilty

Title: This Jury is Guilty

Author: Laurie Blake

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Publication Date: November 3, 2026

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I went into this one expecting a tight, claustrophobic thriller in the vein of Twelve Angry Men, and in some ways that's exactly what I got—just with a lot more moving parts than I bargained for.

Hollywood's biggest star, Danny Scott, stands trial for the attempted murder of his wife, starlet Hope Harrison, and the twelve sequestered jurors deciding his fate turn out to be hiding as many secrets as the defendant. The premise promises that everyone is guilty of something, and the book delivers on that front—maybe too well.

My biggest issue was sheer volume of characters. And
I never fully bought the central conceit that several jurors could engineer their way onto this specific panel—it's a big ask of the reader's suspense of disbelief, and the book doesn't earn it. The deliberation scenes, which should have been the tense heart of the novel, ended up feeling off, and the verdict landed strangely rather than satisfyingly.

The book was engaging, but I just wish I'd had someone to root for. Neither Danny nor Hope earned my sympathy, and with a cast where everyone's guilty of something, there's no one left to anchor the story emotionally. It's a twisty, ambitious locked-room thriller that ultimately buckles a little under its own scope. Interesting, but not quite believable.

A big thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#NetGalley #SourcebooksLandmark

Book Review: The Murder Trial

Title: The Murder Trial

Author: James Patterson and Nancy Allen

Publisher: Little Brown and Company

Publication Date: November 23, 2026

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

James Patterson's latest thriller pairs two timelines—the night of the murders and the trial eleven months later—and the structure is the strongest thing going for it. Watching the two threads close in on each other kept me engaged in a way a straight, linear telling wouldn't have; it's a smart choice for a story built around what Janelle Thompson did or didn't do to her adoptive parents.

Where it lost me was the courtroom itself. The public defender's sloppiness, the way Janelle is treated by the people meant to be on her side, the judge's conduct—none of it read as plausible to me, and once I started questioning the trial's realism I couldn't fully buy into it for the rest of the book. 

It's still a fast read—Patterson's rapid-fire chapters do what they always do, and I moved through this one quickly. But the realism issues kept it from being the kind of Patterson thriller I fully sink into, and that's really what brings this down to 3 out of 5. A quick, competent read that fell a little short of what I expect from him.

A big thank you to Little Brown and Company and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

#LittleBrownCompany #NetGalley