A tense, entertaining terrorist-on-the-run action yarn.
The manhunt for an assassin stretches around the world in Aithal’s twisty debut thriller.
The story unspools from a Taliban plot to assassinate Terence Collins, a Republican congressman from California who’s introduced a bill in 2021 to reinvade Afghanistan. Talib, an Afghan American man who’s the Taliban’s top agent on the West Coast, is assigned the hit; he duly kills Collins with a sniper shot from a yacht anchored near the congressman’s seaside mansion. Using his considerable criminal guile, mastery of disguise, and the stolen identity of a heart surgeon named Ramesh Kumar, Talib flees to Mumbai, India, on his way to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pursuing him is Newport Beach Police Department Detective Tony Ramirez, assisted by telecommunications surveillance of the National Security Agency and by Inspector Sunil Deshpande of the Mumbai police. Ramirez, whose mother, Simran, is Indian and who speaks a smattering of Hindi, ends up in India himself, where he catches up with family and launches himself onto Talib’s trail. Aithal, the author of Beyond the Milky Way (2015), fleshes out this simple chase narrative with reams of intricate procedural details. The chapters from Talib’s third-person point of view regale readers with the nerve-wracking minutiae of the killer’s preparation and practice, disposal of evidence, use of makeup and disguises, and so on. (Readers also see the sneaky online ploys that the Taliban uses to radicalize Talib.) Tony’s sleuthing also features nifty moments, including a brute-force investigation of a day’s worth of airline passengers from Los Angeles to Mumbai. There are some effective scenes of violence, but most of the action is in the labyrinthine calculations of the adversaries, conveyed with chilling aplomb by Aithal’s punchy, hard-boiled prose: “He could have quickly put a bullet between his eyes and stuffed his body in the trunk of the Toyota….It would take at least 16 to 20 hours before the stench was noticeably pungent.” The result is a page-turner that offers suspense with real psychological depth.
A tense, entertaining terrorist-on-the-run action yarn.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-84045-634-7
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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