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: tomorrow
BOOK REVIEW
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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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