A memorable caper that draws on its characters’ plentiful historical knowledge.
Boito offers a contemporary thriller in which a Beefeater and his historian daughter confront an armed force in the Tower of London.
It’s 2023, and Ashley Bellamy is a history major at the University of California, Los Angeles, who’s staying with her father, Clive, in London, doing research for her thesis. Clive is the Chief Yeoman Warder (otherwise known as a Beefeater) at the Tower of London, who gives tours of the site in official dress and takes great pride in his work. The job also allows Clive to live on the Tower grounds, giving him intimate knowledge of the structure’s every nook and cranny. Ashley, though, is more interested in diamonds, including their “history and legends.” She has a strained relationship with her father, but his position affords her access to the famous Kohinoor diamond—a piece at the Tower that has a long and supposedly cursed history. One afternoon, an unattended bag prompts an alert, resulting in the deployment of a bomb squad and the evacuation of the area. Clive senses that the situation isn’t what it seems and discovers that the so-called bomb squad has taken hostages. The Beefeater is hardly going to take this lying down—and Ashley is there to help. The story artfully places its events in a setting that’s not only steeped in English history but is also in the heart of a major metropolitan area. The offbeat locale allows Clive to point out intriguing facts, such as how, for the execution of Anne Boleyn, “It was considered more dignified for nobility to have their heads removed without spectators.” Some of the dialogue, especially between Ashley and Clive, can be a bit bland, but the pair’s circumstances make for a unique thriller. It’s rare to see a setup that involves heroes with crossbows, “lances, a mace, some more longbows, a blunderbuss and several muskets” facing off against enemies with more standard machine guns. The pacing is also well-handled, and the stakes remain high throughout the narrative.
A memorable caper that draws on its characters’ plentiful historical knowledge.Pub Date: today
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.
A woman fears she made a fatal mistake by taking in a blood-soaked tween during a storm.
High winds and torrential rain are forecast for “The Middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire,” making Casey question the structural integrity of her ramshackle rental cabin. Still, she’s loath to seek shelter with her lecherous landlord or her paternalistic neighbor, so instead she just crosses her fingers, gathers some candles, and hopes for the best. Casey is cooking dinner when she notices a light in her shed. She grabs her gun and investigates, only to find a rail-thin girl hiding in the corner under a blanket. She’s clutching a knife with “Eleanor” written on the handle in black marker, and though her clothes are bloody, she appears uninjured. The weather is rapidly worsening, so before she can second-guess herself, former Boston-area teacher Casey invites the girl—whom she judges to be 12 or 13—inside to eat and get warm. A wary but starving Eleanor accepts in exchange for Casey promising not to call the police—a deal Casey comes to regret after the phones go down, the power goes out, and her hostile, sullen guest drops something that’s a big surprise. Meanwhile, in interspersed chapters labeled “Before,” middle-schooler Ella befriends fellow outcast Anton, who helps her endure life in Medford, Massachusetts, with her abusive, neglectful hoarder of a mother. As per her usual, McFadden lulls readers using a seemingly straightforward thriller setup before launching headlong into a series of progressively seismic (and increasingly bonkers) plot twists. The visceral first-person, present-tense narrative alternates perspectives, fostering tension and immediacy while establishing character and engendering empathy. Ella and Anton’s relationship particularly shines, its heartrending authenticity counterbalancing some of the story’s soapier turns.
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781464260919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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