A delightfully funny, playful, and bloody LA noir novel.
Cosgrove’s offbeat investigative thriller features a goofball hero.
The author follows up his novel The Meridian Job (2026) with another adventure featuring hapless private investigator Marv Slocum. At the outset of this installment, Marv is looking to hire a new assistant for his Los Angeles office; the interview process is not going well. (One woman is even killed when her car explodes in the parking lot.) Then, June Park walks in; she’s a no-nonsense woman who spent four years in military intelligence. June is hired, and Marv gets a client—a woman named Catherine Ashworth, who needs help obtaining a manuscript created in the 12th century called the Meridian Codex. The Codex is currently in the hands of a Mexican cartel run by one Rafael Coronado. The Codex is worth some $40 billion because it holds the secrets to money that’s been “hidden for centuries”; its retrieval will be no easy task. Naturally, Catherine is not the only one trying to get her hands on something so valuable; enter Miguel Espinoza, aka El Cuervo. Miguel is a former history professor whose life was turned upside down after his family was killed in connection to the Codex; he’s spent the last six years seeking revenge. He’s happy to help Marv if it means he can finally have, as he puts it, Rafael Coronado “dead at [his] feet.”
Marv provides plenty of comedy as he stumbles his way through dangers big and small. One foe describes him as “This man who destroys everything he touches.” Whether he’s attempting to enjoy some high-end Scotch or inadvertently starting a conga line in a nightclub, half the fun of the story comes in seeing what Marv might do next. Fine comedic details add to the appeal: When Marv drinks the Scotch, the “liquid hit his tongue like liquid smoke, peat, and what he could only describe as ‘angry ocean.’” His eyes water, the drink seemingly a “substance that was actively hostile to human consumption.” As playful as such passages are, much of the humor is dark, as when Marv’s actions result in 13 people being killed in “eleven minutes.” No matter how silly some of the developments are, this is by no means a cozy mystery. In one shootout, someone takes a hit “that severed the carotid artery,” which sprays blood across “Italian Marble in an arc.” The narrative has quite a few moving parts; it’s not always easy to keep track of everyone as various characters are shot and betrayed and new figures enter the fray, such as a woman who starts murdering people and leaving Hebrew letters on their bodies. Add to the mix a corrupt federal agent and an eccentric electronic musician with ties to organized crime, and you have an extensive cast indeed. Still, even if readers are occasionally lost, Marv is always around the corner with some amusing new chaos to unleash.
A delightfully funny, playful, and bloody LA noir novel.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798245033990
Page Count: 545
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.
Second of the Walter Nash thrillers—following Nash Falls (2025)—in which the remade hero seeks vengeance.
Due to urgent circumstances, Nash has bulked himself up to become the “muscled and tatted fighting machine” now known as Dillon Hope. His antagonist is Victoria Steers, a global drug dealer who wants him dead. Not realizing his new identity, she enlists Hope to free her mother, Masuyo, from a prison in Myanmar. As an incentive, she shoots one of her associates and threatens to frame Hope for the murder unless he complies. She also wants him to find Nash. He in turn wants to kill Victoria to avenge the death of his innocent daughter, Maggie. “If I go down,” he muses, “I’m taking others with me. Starting with Victoria Steers.” He learns that Victoria had killed all her siblings to eliminate business competition. But as heartless as Victoria is, her mother, Masuyo, is even worse. In league with the Chinese government in a perverse plan to kill as many Americans as possible through fentanyl overdose, she shows contempt for Victoria for her perceived weaknesses. Readers won’t find many happy family relationships here: mother-daughter, father-son, husband-wife—all fraught. Hope’s employer, who accompanies him to Myanmar, is a billionaire chief executive with a dodgy past (i.e., probably killed his father). And there’s a mega-billionaire with an astronomical IQ and ditch-deep morals who, putting it mildly, does not have America’s best interests at heart. As a teenager, he’d defeated two world chess champions; as an adult, he regards his dealings with the world in terms of master chess moves. Only one character seems truly decent and credible—Hiroko, Victoria’s former nanny and lifelong companion, who provides Hope with valuable insights into the Steers’ background, which is partly Chinese. Searing grudges, simple evil, and not-so-simple misunderstandings carry the cast through this complex, action-packed plot. This sequel ties out the loose ends dangling in Nash Falls, which would be helpful to read first. To get to the requisite ending, though, Baldacci takes pains to surprise the reader. It works but often feels forced.
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781538758021
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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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