This novel will make you shudder. It’s taut, credible, and scary.
Terrorism in America as imagined by a British Indian crime writer.
Eight days before the end of a toxic presidential campaign that’s “resting on a knife edge,” terrorists blow up a mall in Burbank, California. Sixty-five people die in the carnage, including a woman seen running away from the rucksack holding the bomb. FBI Special Agent Shreya Mistry wonders who the culprit is. Several candidates come to mind, like the “American Redemption fanatics, looking to bomb America back to greatness.” Then fingerprints identify the dead woman as Yasmin Malik, a British Muslim. “Why was she running?” Mistry wonders. “The question surfaced unbidden...a cork bobbing in the maelstrom of her mind.” The hunt is on for the perpetrators, and eyes are on innocent men like Sajid Khan. Was he “just another treacherous Muslim? Guilty until proven innocent”? But it’s more complicated. The bad guys follow the much-feared leader Miriam, a “soldier masquerading as messiah….Amish with a hint of assault rifle.” Some of them are former U.S. military like Greg, who nurses a lingering leg wound from combat and whose neck is tattooed with barbed wire and a swastika. Meanwhile, Mistry has personal baggage and professional problems. The agent hasn’t seen her daughter in months, and her FBI bosses don’t like how she operates—she isn’t called “Shreya Misfit” for nothing. And as befits a feisty hero, her suspension by the FBI doesn’t stop her as she tries to avert another horrific attack. As the constant action unfolds, the terrorists always seem to stay a step ahead of the FBI—it’s almost as if the bad guys have a mole inside the agency. Of the many good lines in the story, “hatred didn’t do nuance” may be the most apt.
This novel will make you shudder. It’s taut, credible, and scary.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780316260213
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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