The Spring

The Spring is a remote-commune thriller about Shayla Meeker, a broke New Yorker pulled to California after a distress call from her estranged adoptive sister Phoebe, only to discover that Phoebe’s rich husband Daniel Kinman has been running a predatory refuge for vulnerable girls on his family’s isolated Lost Coast property. It wants to be about sisterhood, foster trauma, influencer culture, missing girls, coercive healing, police failure, wildfire, class power, and cultish male charisma. Mostly, it is a familiar “beautiful monster in paradise” thriller padded with trauma backstory, ominous water imagery, and increasingly mechanical twists.

The novel opens with Shay in New York, exhausted, underpaid, overheated, and sleeping beside Michelle Conway, a doctor whose divorce makes their relationship awkward and unfinished. Shay is barely holding her life together. Her adoptive mother Alma is mute, physically failing, and living in a painfully expensive care facility. Shay works multiple jobs and carries most of the burden alone because Phoebe, Alma’s biological daughter and Shay’s once-beloved sister, disappeared into California years ago with Daniel Kinman, a handsome rich man who has apparently become her whole life.

Then Phoebe calls in the middle of the night. The connection is terrible. She sounds frightened, scattered, and desperate. She says she misses Shay. She says she is in trouble. She says something like “I think you can fix me.” Later, she sends Shay a plane ticket to California, then calls again and seems to warn her not to come. Alma, who has somehow been receiving secret calls from Phoebe, leaves a note saying Phoebe is in trouble and that Shay should not be told. This pushes Shay toward the obvious thriller decision: she drops her life and goes west.