Breakaway Books

Authored by T.C. Boyle; Published April 2026; Thriller

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Another novel, another train wreck that I can’t tear my eyes away from. No Way Home features a love triangle in which not a single participant could possibly have a fully developed frontal cortex, judging from their poor life decisions.

In No Way Home, with the sudden death of his mother, Terry inherits a home in a small town outside of Las Vegas. On a visit to settle her affairs, Terry meets a cute girl in a coffee shop, has a one-night stand, and thinks that’ll be the end of it. But said cute girl, Bethany, is not ready to give up on Terry–and his house–quite so quickly. What starts with a one night stand turns into Bethany squatting in Terry’s house turns into a tumultuous relationship punctuated by acts of violence between Terry and Bethany’s ex-boyfriend Jesse. Stability is not in the cards for these two. 

I found reading this novel to be inherently stressful. Part of it, surely, is that it is brimming with foreshadowing that something truly terrible is going to happen. For every decision that each of the three main characters make, it is blatantly obvious that the consequences will be awful. But part of it is also the amount of outright aggression that Terry, Bethany, and Jesse show to each other—literally just reading about how they fight stresses me out. There is something to be said about the realism of the characters for the fact that I both understand and don’t understand why they act the way they do. I understand how each of them talk themselves into destructive actions, but it’s hard for me not to wonder why the rest of their brains aren’t absolutely screaming at them to change their ways out of some semblance of a self-preservation instinct.

But when I step back from the stress, I see something both deeper and sadder. It’s these three people in their twenties who seem to do very little with their time except drink and do drugs. It’s two out of three of them, stuck in jobs that drain the life out of them and don’t pay very much. It’s three people, who don’t have a lot of hope that things will get better. The insane love triangle that is the centerpiece of this book is sparked, at its core, because Bethany needed a place to live, and Terry had a house that he was not occupying. If Bethany could just find a place that was affordable, none of the violence that ensues need occur. It’s insane to me that such a thing is so difficult. 

You will definitely get sucked into No Way Home. I’m not just not sure that’s a good thing.