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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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