Fast, furious, and funny.
As her identical twin dies from a murderous attack, a San Francisco woman learns she was the intended victim and vows to find the killer before the killer finds her.
In Gerber’s standalone thriller, 29-year-old tech-repair guru Kayla Macintyre is happily single, riding dirt bikes and living in jeans and her Stanford sweatshirt. Her supermodel twin, Ashley, who “couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn anything but silk,” wants Kayla to find someone special. Kayla’s married friend Sara Simmons thinks so too. One night, Sara, a “defiant bioethicist,” breaks into Bledsoe Research Institute to learn what secret research the facility is conducting. Someone finds her there, drugs her, drives her to a scenic overlook, stages her suicide, and pushes her over the railing to her death. If losing Sara wasn’t bad enough, Kayla returns from a blind date and finds Ashley dying in her condo. Ashley’s wearing her sister’s clothes, and an Hermès scarf is wrapped tightly around her neck. “‘He wanted’—Ashley’s voice caught—‘you,’ she says before she dies.” Kayla, uncharacteristically dressed up and coiffed because of her date, lets the police think that she’s Ashley and that Kayla died. Then she delves into the lives of clients whose computers she’d serviced to see if there are digital trails that lead to someone who might have wanted her dead. But there are other suspects, too. And could Sara’s death be tied to Ashley’s? Kayla has her investigative work cut out for her, plus she needs to learn to walk on stilettos and be model perfect at a high-end photo shoot. A lot goes on in this book, and it happens thrillingly quickly. Banter between Kayla and her bestie Eve Clegg, a burgundy-haired waitress/journalist, is often comical. The breakneck pace is heightened by car chases, flying bullets, and creepy scenes reminiscent of those in Robin Cook’s Coma. The cast list is long, maybe too long, but frequent murders cull their ranks.
Fast, furious, and funny.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9798285384243
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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