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
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
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