A high-octane military thriller sure to pound the pulses of even seasoned adventure seekers.
A novel focuses on covert military operations in the harsh terrain of the Darién Gap.
When readers first encounter Dirk Lasher, he’s in a bad way. Running a dive bar in Florida, the former operative is reeling from the recent death of his beloved wife. As if fated, a young soldier, Capt. Benjamin Blake, shows up at the bar, telling Lasher and his compatriot Jack Williams that they’re needed for a mission that has gone belly up in the brutal jungles between Panama and Colombia. Though reluctant, both men are soon roped into the action, with Williams a week ahead as Lasher grieves stateside. Once Lasher acquaints himself with the personalities of the new special ops unit he’s joining, they’re loaded onto a plane bound for the jungle. Before they can land, they’re attacked by the rogue unit they’ve come to root out, and their plane crashes, wiping out everyone on board except for Lasher and a radio specialist, a young woman called Bonsai. As Bonsai and Lasher flee the scene of the crash, they’re rescued by—who else?—Williams and Blake. Chaos quickly erupts: The group is attacked again; Blake is killed; and it’s only Lasher’s quick thinking and deadly work with a hunting knife that prevent the rest of them from being gunned down. As the three survivors attempt to navigate the terrain and unravel the mystery of the rogue unit, Bonsai begins to fall for the enigmatic Lasher. While certain genre conventions do abound in Edward’s military thriller, such as the way female characters are often described in broad, physical strokes (“Bonsai was a fit twenty-six-year-old. She was tall for a female, about average height for a male, still the shortest of the four. Her face was narrow and her chin came almost to a point”), there is more than enough action and suspense here to keep readers flipping pages. In addition, the author offers an intriguing knife-wielding hero who just wants to complete his mission so he can go home and grieve. In this gripping, fast-paced series opener, some of the violence—much of which comes at the business end of a hunting knife—is brutal to get through, but is never gratuitous.
A high-octane military thriller sure to pound the pulses of even seasoned adventure seekers.Pub Date: July 27, 2024
ISBN: 9798334323599
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
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