A visionary, futuristic police procedural that buzzes with imagination and intrigue.
A veteran detective struggles to solve the defining case of his career in McBee’s novel.
The investigations of 13-year FBI special agent Juan McCormack have hit a critical roadblock. Despite the fact that he’s apprehended 12 serial killers in North America, no one on the force will acknowledge the connections he’s drawn between them. The novel is set in a future in which tech advancements allow texts and email messages to be read in one’s peripheral vision, palm-embedded keys can unlock doors, and, most notably, Consensual Visage Projectors can change a person’s outward appearance and what they view, smell, or feel. The detective thinks that someone is hacking into and manipulating CVP technology and forcing people to kill others. However, McCormack is unceremoniously fired after being framed for insubordination, and his case histories are erased. Forced to investigate the case independently, the ex-FBI agent teams up with Dominique “Dee” Fydorova, one of the only manipulated killers to survive after murdering her victim. Together with other tech experts, they sift through digital footprints, skirt police surveillance, examines code fragments and data dumps, and avoid the digital assassin trying to hijack their implants. McBee’s prose keeps up with the fierce momentum of his plot as McCormack digs deeper into the unsolved murders and scrambles to apprehend the killer before he and Dee become the next to die. The book thoroughly explores the theme of technological manipulation as the characters battle unseen digital threats and the exploitation of citizens for monetary gain. Mystery fans and tech-savvy readers will find this multilayered combination of an SF novel, a suspense yarn, and a technothriller to be a cut above others of its ilk.
A visionary, futuristic police procedural that buzzes with imagination and intrigue.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781639889716
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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