Kirkus Review
Kirkus Review
WILL-O’-THE-WISP
by Jenna Gillingham ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 3, 2025
An artful and totally immersive cold-case mystery.
A newly minted PI goes back to her hometown to solve a long-ago disappearance in Gillingham’s debut mystery novel.
When Anna Fischer left the Chicago public defender’s office for a new job with an elite private investigation firm, she never expected her first case would be to solve the crime that’s haunted her for her entire adult life. Fifteen years earlier, Anna’s best friend, Betsy Thompson, went missing in their hometown of Penn’s Point, Wisconsin. “I know more about her disappearance than I have ever told anyone,” Anna reflects when she gets the assignment. “The moment I have been avoiding for the better part of the last decade has finally come.” She should refuse to take the case—there is a clear conflict of interest—but she feels she can’t say no, professionally or personally. She heads back to the small, secretive town of Penn’s Point, surrounded by all of the things she’d tried to leave behind, and starts digging into the scant clues: a police report, some old interviews, a necklace. Did Betsy’s allegedly violent boyfriend murder her? Did she get kidnapped by the reclusive fundamentalist family that lived next to the junkyard where Betsy liked to hang out? Does it have something to do with the intimidating county judge who lives in the old Victorian manse Anna has always called “the witch’s house,” or the mysterious lights in his cornfields? Complicating Anna’s investigation is the fact that her high school sweetheart is now a cop—and the statute of limitations on their feelings for one another hasn’t quite yet run out. Anna will have to decide who she can trust if she wants to solve this mystery, and if she chooses wrong, she might become a cold case of her own. Gillingham’s prose imbues the story with moody unease, turning the ordinary eerie in nearly every scene. The mystery more than delivers on the hook of its premise. Readers will anxiously await Anna’s future cases, whether they unfold in the eerie confines of Penn’s Point or elsewhere. An artful and totally immersive cold-case mystery.
