Submission 4129

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Author: Mary Kay Andrews

Published: 2026

Genre: ContemporaryFiction

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Some inheritances come with complications. Road Trip begins with one of the more unusual: two estranged sisters, a painting that may or may not be worth millions, and the discovery that the only way to find out is to go to Ireland together. Maeve and Therese Dunigan have spent years maintaining a comfortable distance from each other and from the family history they share. Their mother's death closes that distance with the blunt efficiency of an estate to be settled and a mystery to be solved. What follows is Mary Kay Andrews at her most warmly entertaining: a novel that moves through the Irish countryside with considerable charm, weaving together a cold case from 1926, a family secret several generations in the making, two very different sisters learning to tolerate and eventually to know each other, and the particular persuasiveness of an Irish accent at close range.

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Maeve Dunigan is the kind of woman who follows the rules and plans, and has spent a significant portion of her adult life managing the consequences of her sister not doing either. Therese is the kind of woman who makes everything more complicated than it needs to be and more interesting than it would otherwise be. As a college professor and a struggling actress, respectively, they occupy different worlds, and they have been content to keep it that way. Then their mother dies. The estate brings them back into each other's orbit, and with it comes the painting: a portrait that has hung in their family home their entire lives and may, it emerges, be worth considerably more than anyone realised. It may also not be the original. The only way to determine whether it is genuine or a forgery, and to understand where it came from and what it means, is to follow the trail back to its source: Ireland, where their great-grandmother Kathleen left in 1926 under circumstances that have never been entirely explained. Andrews moves the novel across two timelines, weaving the sisters' present-day journey through twisting lanes, colourful villages, and atmospheric pubs with glimpses into 1926 and the mystery that Kathleen carried with her across the Atlantic. The cold case and the family secret are entangled, and their unravelling requires the sisters to do the one thing neither of them was prepared to do: work together, and pay attention to each other in the process. Romance arrives, as it reliably does in the Irish countryside, and with considerably more charm than either sister anticipated.

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- “Estrangement and the particular effort of coming back”: Maeve and Therese have not simply drifted apart; they have actively maintained their separation, and Andrews is honest about the mutual irritation and old grievance that make their forced proximity genuinely uncomfortable before it becomes genuinely productive. The novel does not pretend that shared blood is sufficient to override years of diverging values and accumulated frustration. What it does is give the sisters a common purpose large enough to require them to set down, at least temporarily, the versions of each other they have been carrying around. - “Family history as something that arrives when you are ready to receive it”: The 1926 timeline is not merely an atmospheric backdrop; it is the key to everything the present-day sisters need to understand about themselves, their mother, and the object at the centre of their inheritance. Andrews handles the historical thread with the lightness of a novelist who enjoys the period without being enslaved to it, and the gradual emergence of Kathleen's story gives the road trip a sense of genuine discovery: these women are not just travelling through Ireland, they are travelling into their own history. - “The painting as a stand-in for authenticity”: The question of whether the portrait is genuine or a forgery runs through the novel as both plot engine and quiet metaphor. Maeve and Therese are each, in their own way, performing a version of themselves that is not entirely authentic, and the search for the real painting is shadowed by the search for the real sisters underneath the roles they have assigned each other. Andrews does not labour the parallel, but it gives the mystery an emotional resonance that extends beyond the art historical question. - “Opposites and what they actually share”: The rule-follower and the rebel structure is one of the oldest in sibling fiction, and Andrews uses it with enough specificity to avoid the trap of making either sister a type. Maeve's rule-following is a response to something, and Therese's rebellion is too, and the novel is interested in the possibility that two people who appear to want entirely different things might, at the level of actual need, be reaching toward the same ones.

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- The Irish landscape. Andrews writes place with genuine affection, and the Irish sections of the novel are suffused with a warmth and specificity that make the setting feel inhabited rather than picturesque. The country inns, the village pubs, the winding lanes and rain-softened light: these are not travel brochure Ireland but a particular, textured world that earns its charm through accumulated detail. Readers who have been to Ireland will recognise it, and readers who have not will want to go. - Kathleen's story. The 1926 glimpses of the sisters' great-grandmother are among the novel's most quietly absorbing sections. Andrews gives Kathleen enough specificity to make her a real person rather than a narrative device, and the mystery of what she left behind in Ireland, and why, has genuine weight. These sections give the road trip its sense of stakes beyond the financial, and the eventual revelation of what happened is handled with satisfying precision. - Liam. He is a romantic interest drawn with the light touch that this kind of novel does best: charming, capable, possessed of an accent the narrative does not allow us to forget, and attentive to Maeve in ways that are specific enough to feel genuine rather than generic. The romance between them develops at a pace that complements rather than dominates the central mystery, and his presence gives Maeve something the novel has been quietly preparing her to receive: the experience of being seen by someone who is not measuring her against her sister. - Therese's redemption arc. She is the novel's most energetic presence and its most genuinely frustrating character in its early pages, and Andrews manages the challenge of making her eventual pivot feel earned rather than convenient. The key is that Therese does not transform; she reveals. What was always present beneath the recklessness becomes visible when the circumstances require it, and the effect is of a character the reader has been reading correctly all along, just through the wrong lens.

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Road Trip is for readers who want their summer reading to deliver on every element of its premise: a genuinely engaging mystery, a landscape that makes you want to book a flight, sisters who are complicated enough to be interesting and warm enough to root for, and romance handled with the right touch of lightness. Mary Kay Andrews reliably delivers this combination, and this novel represents one of her more satisfying recent efforts. Readers who love women's fiction with a mystery element embedded in a travel narrative will find the structure here particularly rewarding. The Irish setting does real work in the novel, not just atmospherically but thematically, and the dual timeline that weaves 1926 into the present-day road trip gives the novel a historical depth that lifts it above the purely contemporary. The cold case thread is genuinely engaging without tipping the novel into thriller territory, maintaining the warm, accessible tone that distinguishes Andrews's work. For readers who are drawn to sibling dynamics in fiction, the Maeve-Therese relationship is rendered with enough honesty to feel real. The irritation is genuine, the history is present, and the gradual movement toward something more functional is satisfying precisely because Andrews does not rush it or resolve it more cleanly than the material supports. A note for readers who prefer their central characters immediately sympathetic: Therese requires patience in the novel's early sections, and some readers may find her considerable. The payoff is real, and the character work ultimately justifies the investment, but readers who are sensitive to protagonists who generate friction rather than warmth may want to approach the first third with that awareness. For everyone else, Road Trip is exactly what it promises: an entertaining, warmhearted journey through a beautifully rendered landscape, in the company of two women who are better together than they are separately, even if it takes them the length of Ireland to admit it.

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This review is part of the Indian Book Club’s editorial initiative to spotlight books that inspire, inform, and leave a lasting impact on readers. Every title featured is carefully handpicked and reviewed by the IBC Editorial Team to maintain quality, authenticity, and literary value. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to submit a book for review, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please write to us at: editorial@indianbookclub.com Our team personally evaluates each submission, and selected books are featured as official IBC Editorial Reviews on our platform.