The sunshine man / Emma Stonex.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other . . ."

A taut, electrifying thriller about a woman determined to avenge her sister's murder--and the killer who must confront his own ghosts

Birdie Keller wakes one freezing January morning to the news she's been waiting eighteen years to hear. Jimmy Maguire, the man who killed her sister, has been freed from jail. She leaves for London with a pistol and a plan: to find this man and make him pay.

But every story has two sides. Jimmy can sense he's being hunted. He knew Birdie a long time ago, in a life she'd sooner forget, and he isn't the only one with something to hide. As the two circle each other in a heart-stopping game of cat and mouse, they plunge into a murky world of family secrets, betrayals, and unsolved mysteries.

A tense, spellbinding page-turner, The Sunshine Man twists its way through the web of lives left shattered after a terrible crime and crafts an unforgettable tale of loss and revenge.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

A Wiltshire woman stalks her sister's killer in this mournful crime thriller from British novelist Stonex (The Lamplighters). One morning in 1989, Bridget Keller learns that James Maguire is being released from prison after serving 18 years for murdering her younger sister, Providence. Bridget sees her husband off on a business trip, arranges for her mother-in-law to collect her kids after school, and retrieves the gun she secretly purchased in anticipation of this day. She then departs for London, prepared to tail James until the moment is right for her to exact justice. Meanwhile, an oblivious James carries out his own agenda, assisted by a daughter he barely knows. Stonex's sophomore effort is at once a rage-fueled revenge tale and a heartbreaking exploration of memory's fallibility, compassion's power, and violence's cyclical nature. Childhood flashbacks are peppered throughout Bridget's anguished first-person narration, while letters and journal entries James wrote in prison add context to third-person chapters that chronicle his postincarceration struggles. Slack pacing occasionally saps the narrative of momentum, but fans of sinuous slow burns will be entertained. (Nov.)

Booklist Review

Young Jimmy Maguire was neglected by his alcoholic mother and brutally abused by his father. Bridget "Birdie" Doyle, abandoned as a baby by her teenaged mother, was raised by her "Gamma" in the village where the Maguires lived. When Birdie was seven, her mother left another baby, Providence, for Gamma to raise. Birdie adored her. Despite Birdie's concern (and jealousy), as Providence grew, she befriended Jimmy. Then, at age 12, Providence was brutally murdered. Jimmy was accused and convicted, though he claimed his friend Floyd was the killer. Years later, Jimmy is released from prison, and Birdie, still damaged by her mother's abandonment and the loss of her beloved sister, wants Jimmy to pay for his sins. But when Jimmy's grown daughter, conceived just before he was imprisoned, shows up to help him face postprison life, Birdie's plan is temporarily thwarted. Themes of redemption, revenge, and guilt are woven throughout the book, which delves deep into the human psyche, revealing the consequences of neglect, abandonment, violence, societal expectations, and the absence of love. Stonex's latest (after The Lamplighters, 2021) is a raw, gritty psychological thriller that will leave readers breathless.

Kirkus Book Review

On the day of a prisoner's release, a woman sets out to settle an old score. "The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other." With that opening sentence, Stonex plunges us into the mind and world of Bridget "Birdie" Keller, a wife and mother in the rural countryside of Wiltshire, England. But Birdie's world is not quite so tranquil: 18 years earlier, a man was incarcerated for killing Birdie's half sister, Providence, and this is the day of his release, a day that Birdie has prepared for. Just as Birdie's voice settles in comfortably, a second narrator emerges. James Maguire is the man convicted of killing Providence, and his voice and story prove to be just as immersive as Birdie's. Shaped by Stonex's skillful hands, a compelling picture emerges spanning the decades from 1947 to 1989. In a small Devon village where everyone knows everyone else's business, the lives of several kids are ineluctably entwined. Some of their interconnections are due to Birdie's kind, caring grandmother. Gamma raised Birdie and Providence after their mother abandoned them, and she welcomed James into her home at a critical time. Though the makeshift family initially works well, miscommunication and outright lies quickly set in. Stonex's success doesn't lie solely in the creation of two riveting narrators. She weaves evocative imagery throughout the text, from a piece of knitting "messy as a jellyfish" to a carpet stain shaped like the Isle of Wight and the titular Sunshine Man, a wooden scarecrow doubling as an ad for Yellowfields Seed Oil. This thriller demonstrates on nearly every page the power of the written word. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.