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
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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