A cool thriller with well-blended elements of crime, suspense, and gaming culture.
In Burke’s immersive thriller, real and virtual lives interweave in the metaverse.
“You haven’t lived until you’ve died in the Land of Might and Magic.” Xperion’s tagline for its most popular virtual-reality multiplayer fantasy game takes on an ominous cast when a player hacks into the game to bypass its leveling rules and starts “killing” the top players. The hacker’s character, now known as “gray warrior,” proves to be invisible to the developers and impossible to beat by the other players, causing an avalanche of issues for Xperion’s senior staff, who commission their own hacker to find the culprit. Shea Britton, an avid gamer and a top player in the Land of Might and Magic, starts her own investigation from within the game. In the real world, Parker Reid, the preeminent profiler at the FBI, is on the trail of a potential new serial killer. The violent manner of execution, the chilling trophies, and the macabre poses the victims are left in all point to a maniac who needs to be stopped, and soon. Initial victim profiling fails to reveal a common thread until the investigators uncover the victims’ connection to the famous virtual-reality game, and the convergence of Shea’s and Parker’s investigations becomes inevitable. In this engaging, page-turning thriller, the author seamlessly weaves two seemingly disparate threads: Parker Reid’s story has a sense of real-life authenticity to the investigation, while Shea’s pursuit in the fantasy realm of the Land of Might and Magic, complete with character-building and rules of the game, brings a unique and refreshing dynamic to the plot. The narrative incorporates elements of corporate greed and dysfunctional families along with compelling character development for both Shea and Parker, making for a well-rounded read. While there’s a degree of predictability when it comes to the culprit, the journey is a reward in itself.
A cool thriller with well-blended elements of crime, suspense, and gaming culture.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781951122720
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Artemesia Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2023
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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