Great characters, superb storytelling.
The middle entry in a trilogy—following Nero (2024)—about Roman Emperor Nero’s turbulent life.
In the year 50, the 30-something Agrippina marries the 60-something Emperor Claudius, who adopts her son, Lucius, and renames him Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. The young lad is a handful, having managed with his friends to kill their tutor with a sack full of wasps. Luckily, he’s a minor and has his mother’s fierce protection. Quite the beauty, Agrippina “strangles poor Claudius in her skirts” and is rightly called “a destroyer.” Enemies seek to disgrace her and expose her to Claudius as a “faithless whore.” She kills him with foxglove powder supplied by her auspex, Locusta, opening the door for Nero to become emperor at age 16. But wait, what about Britannicus, the emperor’s biological son? Claudius said he’s next in line to be emperor, but the boy is an obstacle in the way of Agrippina’s ambition. Younger than Nero, Britannicus is but a pesky detail. Earlier, Nero tried to get him killed in a chariot race and nearly succeeded. Iggulden weaves a complex yarn based on events reported 50 years after the fact by writers such as Tacitus, so readers may wonder if the real Nero was as nasty as he appears to be. The best answer is to call it fiction and enjoy. Many details are marvelous, like the mock naval battles held in arenas that Roman engineers flood with sea water. It’s about the depravity of a mother and son seeking raw power and about the clash of wills that proves her undoing.
Great characters, superb storytelling.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368891
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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