A briskly told thriller sure to engage armchair vigilantes.
Jimmy Dawson and The Defenders race against time in their pursuit of a serial rapist and human traffickers in this high-stakes sequel.
Jimmy Dawson, introduced in McDonald’s series debut, The Defenders (2025), has been paroled after spending almost three years in Leavenworth prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now fully exonerated, Dawson serves as a member of the clandestine Defenders, using his powers as an intuitive empath who can sense the good and evil in people to protect the innocent. Bert Halston is a mega-evil trucker who runs drugs for Mr. Pham, a high-ranking member of a Vietnamese gang based in Chicago; he is also a murderer of women. Ten years earlier, Bert killed Katie Miller, the best friend of The Defenders’ founder. Dawson foils his attempted abduction of a waitress named Hannah, which puts him in the killer’s crosshairs. The rest of The Defenders are focused on the search for Camilla Estrada, a Mexican native whose father has been murdered by the Zeta drug cartel. A promising student with a bright future ahead, she becomes a captive of a human trafficking ring run by Mr. Pham. But Camilla, in the words of one of her captors, is “a feisty one,” and she will not go quietly. As for The Defenders, this missing person case is “a perfect example of what the team was built for.” No matter their stand on illegal immigration, “the bottom line is that we have an 18-year-old girl who is missing…Let’s find her first, and then worry about the legal issues.” Mileage may vary among readers regarding The Defenders’ rather tenuous grasp of the legal issues. At one point, they abduct Bert’s sister and inject her with various drugs. “Who are you guys?” she quite reasonably inquires. But their targets are truly the worst of the worst, so there is some satisfaction in the team’s pursuit of vengeance.
A briskly told thriller sure to engage armchair vigilantes.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798271257636
Page Count: 269
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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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