There’s a particular kind of book that earns its keep on a beach chair, an airport lounge, or a window seat on a rainy Sunday. The kind that asks you to leave your skepticism at the door and go along for the ride. Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews is exactly that book, and it knows it.

The Story Behind the Painting

Maeve and Therese Dunagin are the sort of sisters who have spent decades cataloguing each other’s faults. Maeve, the younger one, is a creative writing professor with a tidy little carriage house and a tidy little knot of resentment over having been the only daughter who actually showed up for their dying mother. Therese is everything Maeve refuses to be: a vagabond actress who survives on charm, a flask, and the occasional Poshmark sale of a 1991 Smashing Pumpkins concert tee. Their mother’s Savannah funeral throws them back into the same orbit, and within hours they are squabbling over coffee, car keys, and a portrait that has hung above their family fireplace for as long as they can remember.

That portrait is the engine of the novel. Painted by a once-renowned British society artist, it shows a sharp-eyed Edwardian woman called Lady Geraldine Fitzhugh, and the late Mary Helen Dunagin insisted, against all evidence, that the lady was their great-great-grandmother. After a few quick Google searches, Therese discovers their mother might not have been telling tall tales after all. The painting could be worth real money. It could also be a forgery. The only way to find out is to follow the trail of Kathleen Connor, the Irish ancestor who carried that canvas across the Atlantic in 1926, back to the village she once fled.

Two Sisters, One Reluctant Reunion

The sisterly bickering is the engine inside the engine. Andrews writes these scenes with the lived-in shorthand of someone who has clearly watched real siblings, not idealized ones. Maeve carries a clipboard. Therese pinches twenties from Maeve’s purse to fill the gas tank. There is a quiet moment, with Maeve sorting through their mother’s lingerie drawer and remembering a nine-year-old Therese in a corset performing “Like a Virgin” for an audience of one, that lands with a bittersweet honesty I wasn’t expecting. The book is funny, often very funny, but it does not let its narrators off the hook. Both women are flawed in specific, recognizable ways, and watching them slowly stop posturing is the quiet heart of the whole story.

From Savannah Sidewalks to Wicklow Pubs

Once the action moves to County Wicklow, Andrews leans hard into the postcard. The fictional village of Tarrymore comes with a crumbling manor house, a tea-room, an honest-to-goodness family distillery, a foggy graveyard at St. Bonaventure, and pubs full of locals who somehow all know each other’s mothers. None of this is subtle, and none of it is meant to be. Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews wants to give you a holiday between two covers, and on that count it delivers handsomely. Liam, the bearded head distiller who takes Maeve pub-crawling, is essentially a love letter to every BritBox-watching reader’s daydream.

A Tale Told in Two Timelines

Where the novel pulls off something more interesting than a standard sister-comedy is in the dual timeline. The 1926 chapters follow Kathleen Connor, a teenage girl pushed out of Rossington Hall on the night of a terrible crime, sailing in steerage to a New York she cannot imagine. Andrews handles these period passages with care. The Ellis Island sequence, the steamship sickness, the kindness of a woman named Maggy in a shared berth, all of it carries a weight the contemporary chapters do not aim for. Kathleen’s letters to her younger brother Tommy thread through the present-day investigation, and you genuinely want to know what happened to her after she landed in America.

Romance with a Side of Single Pot

The romance is gentle, low-stakes, and exactly what the book’s intended audience signed up for. Maeve and Liam share more conversations than steam. Therese gets a subplot with Scotty, a Savannah investigator who flies in to help untangle the family’s financial troubles. If you want grand declarations and torrid scenes, this is not your book. If you want banter and slow-burn warmth, it absolutely is.

Quick beats that work especially well:

• The recurring business with Mary Helen’s maroon 1988 Chrysler LeBaron, christened the Beast
• Esme Rossington, a chain-smoking aristocrat shooting pool in a flat cap, who steals every chapter she enters
• Sinead the English cocker spaniel, who deserves her own spinoff
• The genuinely funny details of jet-lagged American driving on left-hand Irish lanes
• A cleverly buried thread about a 1970s IRA art heist that gives the cozy plot some real bite

Where the Story Stumbles

For all its charm, the book is not without its frustrations. The mystery elements are a touch too neat. Coincidences pile up faster than the cousins at Aunt Frannie’s house. A few suspicious “accidents” in Ireland are telegraphed long before they arrive, and the eventual villain announces himself with all the subtlety of a brass band. The pacing also sags in the middle third, where library visits and document research start to feel like a checklist before the next plot beat. The novel would have been sharper with fifty fewer pages of well-meaning exposition between the inn and the finale.

Therese, for all her one-liners, sometimes feels written rather than lived. Her edges are softer than the setup promises, and her central change of heart arrives without enough resistance. The closing chapters, while satisfying, tie everything up with a level of generosity that pushes past wish-fulfillment into something closer to fairy dust.

Mary Kay Andrews’ Familiar Strengths

If you have read Andrews before, the trademark moves are all here, polished and on display. The Savannah specificity. The cousin-strewn family scenes. The food. The Southern aunts who pour the good liquor and tell you to stop fussing. Her last novel, Summers at the Saint, leaned into a similar mix of property drama and slow-burn romance, and fans of that one will find familiar warmth here. This outing marks a slight tonal shift, with a cozy-mystery backbone and a transatlantic setting, but it is unmistakably hers. Readers who came in through The Homewreckers, The Newcomer, or earlier classics like Savannah Blues and Hissy Fit will slip into the new novel like a familiar pair of sandals.

Who Will Love This Book

This one is a clear fit for readers who:

1. Loved The Homewreckers, The Newcomer, or Hello, Summer
2. Enjoy multi-generational family stories with a light mystery thread
3. Want a vacation in book form, set somewhere green and a little bit rainy
4. Are looking for sister stories that are sharper than Hallmark but softer than literary fiction
5. Are happy to trade some plot tightness for charm and atmosphere

If You Loved Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews, Try These

• The High Tide Club by Mary Kay Andrews, for a similar tangle of inheritance, family secrets, and Southern women refusing to behave
• Summers at the Saint by Mary Kay Andrews, the author’s previous novel and its closest cousin in tone
• The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods, for an Irish setting and dual-timeline storytelling with a side of magic
• The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel, for richer historical depth alongside present-day discovery
• The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer, for layered family-secret storytelling across generations
• The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley, for found-family warmth and gentle reveals

Final Thoughts

Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews is not flawless, and it does not seem terribly interested in being flawless. It is interested in carrying you across an ocean in good company, with a glass of single pot whiskey in your hand and a chuckle in your throat. Forgive a tidy ending and a pinch of melodrama, and this is one of the more pleasurable summer reads of the year, a confident return for a writer with decades of practice at making readers feel at home.