This seventh outing continues to entertain with suspenseful turns and engaging characters.
Racial tensions continue to mount as assassination attempts across U.S. cities become more brazen in this installment of Myers’ thriller series.
New Yorkers Donald Alexander, Kwame Mills, and Sammie Rivers have found success as businesspeople of color. The media dubs them the Black Camelots, and white supremacist groups like Before Emancipation and Michigan Whites target them and their loved ones. (On the Camelots’ side is a private army, the Society of Protectors.) The ongoing race war in America has seen casualties. The latest strike is a second assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate and unabashed racist Digby Yates in his Tennessee hometown; Before Emancipation then responds in kind by killing two people with close ties to the Black Camelots. While numerous people see merit in taking out Yates, California senator Janet Bivens, the Democratic presidential candidate, is wary, fearful that such a bold move would further escalate the race war (“She fears, rightfully, that his death would make him a martyr”). Others immersed in the civil and political unrest include various journalists, police detectives, and The Voice, the Society of Protectors’ mysterious leader. Readers familiar with Myers’ series will know what to expect—ongoing subplots are tied off and new threads begun. Some storylines feel detached from the main narrative but involve returning characters affected by all that’s unfolded in the previous books. (For example, socialite Flower White shops for a new house; she’s getting away from Yates, her estranged husband, who instigated the murder-for-hire that inadvertently killed Flowers’ beloved sister.) This installment evenly spotlights the cast members and their absorbing stories (Donald suffers a recurring nightmare; Kwame’s wife, Michelle, has a startling confession). The narrative moves at a speedy tempo, and there’s no doubt by the end that the author has more sequels in the works.
This seventh outing continues to entertain with suspenseful turns and engaging characters.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Fero Scitus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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