Propulsive, bloody, with a hero who’s more John Rambo than Sherlock Holmes.
The third Kurt Argento novel is a bare-knuckle brawl of a book: fast, violent, unrelenting.
After the mayhem of the last book, Hard Town (2025), Argento, one-time Detroit cop turned freelance vigilante, is living under an alias in South Dakota, where he scratches out a living as church handyman and groundskeeper. He’s mowing the lawn one day when a teenage Syrian refugee, Majed, sprints past, pursued by two goons. Argento’s protective instincts kick in, but his intervention can’t prevent an explosion of violence. Soon he and Majed begin a cross-country dash, pursued by a pair far more savage—and more skilled—than any local muscleheads. The mystery that drives much of the novel is Why Majed?, but it’s not a question Argento and Majed investigate immediately. Argento is, as he says early on, less a detective than a "door kicker," a man of action, a ruthless dispenser of justice as he sees it. His utterly confident, quasi-religious sense of right and wrong fuels these novels, which move from fight to fight rather than clue to clue. Need to acquire a gun? Steal from someone who’s forfeited his right by concealed-carrying while drunk. Need a new, untraceable car? Seek out a vicious pimp and violently dispossess him. What about the villain’s security? The hired hand who doesn’t know he’s working for a monster deserves special consideration. Argento’s moral code, which for worse or (on uneasy balance) better he’s teaching Majed as they go, forms the novel’s core. The only way to negotiate a messy, evil-filled world, he believes, is to counteract the chaos with a code. That code may be idiosyncratic or inconsistent, but it cannot allow room for doubt. Our rooting interest couldn’t be clearer: Argento is the hero, and the forces arrayed against him are (sometimes cartoonishly) evil. But we get glimpses of ambiguity. Occasionally Majed wants to show a measure of mercy, and we see that Argento likes his justice swift and permanent. And the man ultimately behind the plot turns out to be a twisted analog to Argento, convinced that he’s doing what God has commanded.
Propulsive, bloody, with a hero who’s more John Rambo than Sherlock Holmes.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781538778869
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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