Chock-full of action and intrigue, this adult graphic novel thriller will delight fans of spy novels and noir films.
High-stakes kidnapping, political machinations, and death-defying schemes fill Brrémaud’s historical graphic novel.
It’s 1958, and Cuba is under the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista, who controls the corrupt police force known as La Muerte and is actively making deals with members of the CIA. John Botia, former CIA agent turned private detective working at the Valdés agency, is waiting with his co-worker José Cojones to pick up their boss’s daughter for her visit during the school holidays. Just when Lily Valdés-Turner gets off the boat and meets up with John and José, a bomb goes off at the wharf in an attack led by Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries. If babysitting the boss’s daughter wasn’t enough, John must also deal with José’s whining and more surprise attacks by the revolutionaries. Local mobster Alfonso Piñeiro soon lets John know that Lily’s dad owes him $50,000. Alfonso, however, offers them a chance to repay the debt. All they have to do is kidnap the mistress of another mobster and deliver her to Alfonso—or else they can kiss some family members goodbye. John thought kidnapping Concepción Milagros, the middling actress and mobster mistress, was going to be the worst part. What ensues is a derring-do of evading Concepción’s boyfriend and his minions, Alfonso’s goons, and the corrupt CIA agents who are still mad at John for interrupting their machinations. All while the country is being overrun by rebel forces fighting against the Batista regime. Author Brrémaud and illustrator Macioci have brought to the U.S. their historical graphic novel, a mix of old-school noir and spy thriller. The author provides a brief history of Cuba from the 1920s to the story’s setting of the late 1950s; he shows the rise of the dictator Batista, describes the impact of the revolution, and explains the prevalence of CIA agents in the country. The colorful illustrations serve to highlight the bright sheen of Batista-era Cuba seemingly to mask the dark, seedy underbelly of corruption and crime. This graphic novel packs a lot into its 200 pages and seems to be begging for a sequel, considering all the characters the ending leaves in precarious circumstances.
Chock-full of action and intrigue, this adult graphic novel thriller will delight fans of spy novels and noir films.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781545826973
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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