Well-developed female leads and loads of action and adventure make this a page-turning, if slightly predictable, read.
The first installment in Kulak’s new series is a thriller revolving around three female best friends and their attempt to rescue one of their own who becomes entangled with a sex trafficking ring.
Angie Hunter, Tiffany Knight, and Kaylee McDouglas have been close friends ever since childhood. Having grown up in Mount Miffsberg, the trio are still living in the town—and not exactly living the dream. Angie is a welder who moonlights teaching martial arts; Kaylee works at a sewage treatment plant, and Tiffany is a self-described “worthless stripper.” When Kaylee announces to her friends that she is engaged to a shady businessman from Bulgaria—and that she is traveling to the Balkans to meet her new fiance’s parents—Angie and Tiff know immediately that something isn’t right. After Kaylee’s text messages stop shortly after she arrives in Bulgaria, her two friends realize that she’s in danger. They don’t know where she is—or if she is even alive at all—so they travel to Bulgaria to investigate. Not knowing the language makes their mission difficult, but they befriend some locals—Og, a handsome bartender, and Dueza, a transgender woman with an intimate knowledge of the Bulgarian Mafia. They begin to piece together the tidbits of information. Kaylee’s fiance, it seems, is the head of a criminal organization that abducts women from all over the world and forces them into a life of sexual trafficking.
A healthy suspension of disbelief is needed here; the welder and her stripper friend take on and defeat, on numerous occasions, members of the Bulgarian mafia. The fight scenes, however, are well choreographed and believable, to an extent: “As soon as [Angie] had disabled his punching arm, she moved her quiet attention to his forward knee and kicked right through the tender cartilage, yielding a monstrous howl from the man. Elbow gone, knee gone. Not much he could do now except crumple to the floor. As he dropped, Angie pinched hard at the side of his neck until he fully passed out.” The humor is also a plus, making for some laugh-out-loud sequences. In one fight sequence, for example, Tiffany’s bout of explosive diarrhea helps to save the day: “Tiff couldn’t hold it any longer. She bent forward to let her colon relieve itself onto the lower half of Igor’s expensive suit.” But the real strengths here are twofold—the emotional connection and power of the three friends’ relationships and the thematic gravity of international sex trafficking. Kulak could’ve easily included gratuitous sex scenes to underscore the horrors of sexual slavery but, rightfully so, he only alludes to the brutality. The way the abductors treat women as objects, particularly American women, is terrifying enough: “We take America’s riches. The bitches are the riches.” The storyline does have minor issues, however, aside from the highly unlikely issue of two people going up against an entire crime syndicate. The overall ending concerning the three friends is a foregone conclusion—although the author does include a tantalizing twist that savvily leaves the door open for a natural sequel—and the description of Mount Miffsberg is underwhelming. The depiction of a rural American town could’ve had much a more thematic impact, but is only superficially explored.
Well-developed female leads and loads of action and adventure make this a page-turning, if slightly predictable, read.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781304213860
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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