Clickbait for readers searching for a taut, timely thriller.
Teenage social media influencers live large—until two of them stop living at all—in Brown’s second thriller about South Boston private eye Earl Town.
Mafia don Giacomo “Momo” Ragazzi, bolstered by henchmen Fat Tommy and Skinny Mikey, asks Town to investigate the seemingly unrelated tragedies that befell two girls hired by Boom Productions as influencers. Boom’s young online trendsetters got rich fast by promoting products. But two girls are dead, one allegedly part of a murder-suicide, the other found with fentanyl in her system. Then someone torches the backstage trailer of Momo’s granddaughter, Mona Lisa, one of Boom’s biggest stars, with her in it. Handily, Earl was nearby to help save her. Working parallel to Earl on Boom cases is the sexy but “hard-ass” city cop Pamela Prentiss. But his wandering eye also spies Boom’s head of talent, Divya Singh, who has a tiger tattoo wrapped around her left calf and ankle. Dateable and nearly jailbaitable women aside, the case gets more twisted as Earl discovers that more than influencing goes on with the Boom crowd—including blackmail, kidnapping, and a near-death encounter with a propeller. Brown describes the fast-lane world of social influencing well; Mona Lisa is driven, professional, and sexy but still little more than a kid. The tension of finding a murderer while under mob-boss pressure, plus the drama of rich and fashionable young women dating rock stars, plays out well, but character names like Fat Tommy and even Mona Lisa could be less obvious. And Brown deftly weaves in backstory supplied in Book 1 of the series, Indian Summer (2019). Earl’s working-class background is now a whiter shade of blue-collar as he notes a woman’s watch “was a porcelain number from Chanel.” Chanel offers a ceramic watch, not a fine porcelain one, but Earl will probably figure that out by Book 3.
Clickbait for readers searching for a taut, timely thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73374-983-1
Page Count: 267
Publisher: C. James Brown Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Fast-moving and disturbingly plausible.
Robots may be the future of warfare in this final father-son DeMille collaboration.
In Camp Hayden, Army Maj. Roger Ames is found dead, his skull crushed. Chief Warrant Officers Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor, special agents of the United States Army Criminal Investigation Division, are sent to the Mojave Desert, “a.k.a. in the middle of nowhere,” to investigate. In this fictional military installation, Army Rangers conduct field training exercises with lethal autonomous weapons. These “dangerous new toys,” nicknamed “tin men,” may become the future of warfare if they can be programmed to distinguish between friend and foe. Anyway, the Rangers’ job is to train the tin men, not the other way around. They are AI-driven robotic prototypes called D-17s, but even prototypes can kill. Did a bot kill the major? And was there criminal liability or intent, or was it a tragic accident? Brodie and Taylor discover that not everyone loves these beasts, and they must find out if humans are programming them for mischief or even trying to set up the program for failure. Meanwhile, the bots have nicknames. Bot number 20 is Bucky, seen on a video as a “seven-foot-tall titanium machine with hands covered in blood and brain matter” that has “a face but no eyes, with hands but no skin, with a body but no soul.” As scary as these beasties are, Brodie and Taylor must also look at the humans at Camp Hayden, because they learn that the “machines don’t have motives….They have inputs and outputs,” which naturally come from human programmers. They have neither brains nor courage nor honor; they do have brute force, speed, and agility. Obviously, plenty goes haywire in this enjoyable yarn. It feels a bit too believable for comfort, and that’s to the DeMilles’ credit as storytellers. Nelson DeMille had begun this project with his son Alex, who had to finish it alone after his father’s death.
Fast-moving and disturbingly plausible.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781501101878
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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