A refreshingly unconventional hero in a fitfully effective thriller.
A pathologist and toxicologist who moonlights as an Agency assassin gets recruited for an operation that hits devastatingly close to home in this thriller sequel.
Grigory Markovic, the Russian criminal “behind the biggest terror threat to this country,” is still out there, and he knows Dr. Lily Robinson’s identity. It has only been a few months since Robinson helped foil Markovic’s mass poisoning plot. Now, he’s looking to hook up with the North Koreans, who are conspiring with scientist Dr. Wei Guan, a Chinese middleman, to purchase his deadly new technology, which could unleash catastrophic chemical warfare. Robinson’s assignment from the Agency is to use her “encyclopedic knowledge of toxins” to kill Guan without obvious bloodshed. This is what she does on her “away time” from her job as a medical school professor and toxicology consultant. The assassinations are a clear violation of her Hippocratic oath, but the lives she saves allow her to rationalize the killings. It is also her way to stay busy to stem the guilt over losing her daughter years before while Robinson was on a field trip in the jungles of Colombia. “I wish I had my baby, my Rose,” she laments. “Someone to save the world for.” It is not too much of a spoiler to note that one of Robinson’s new students bears a resemblance to her. “There are so many loose ends to tie,” as one character notes at one point, and Magnani does an efficient job of juggling the backstory for those who did not read the first book in this fledgling series. The author also deftly manages a gallery of characters with the requisite suspicious motivations and allegiances, so many that Robinson disappears from the narrative for stretches at a time. (Her chapters are the only ones written in the first person, which can be distracting.) The science of toxins is well rendered, and Magnani crafts some indelible images (“The moon, full in the sky, round and bright, with a ribbon of dark clouds rippled across its face like the mask of the Lone Ranger”). But as the story reaches an emotional climax, readers may be inclined to agree with Robinson when she admits: “I’m not sure I can take any more revelations.”
A refreshingly unconventional hero in a fitfully effective thriller.Pub Date: March 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64599-165-6
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Encircle Publications, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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