A thoughtful and often comedically sharp reflection on political corruption.
A journalist uncovers a sprawling conspiracy that may implicate the president of the United States in Rothman’s political suspense novel.
Jonathan Stone, a veteran reporter for the Washington Telegram, sets his investigative sights on a dangerous subject, Seymour “Sy” Solomon, a remarkably powerful and deep-pocketed real estate mogul who seems to be beloved by everyone; he’s widely admired for his self-propelled rise to riches and lauded everywhere for his philanthropic efforts. He’s even close friends with George McWilliams, Stone’s boss and the editor of the newspaper. Nevertheless, Stone finds it impossible to ignore the fact that Solomon, who owns half the federal office leases in Washington, D.C., keeps receiving lucrative government contracts—Stone’s gut tells him the man is a “born grabber.” The more Stone digs, the dirtier Solomon seems. For one, he has an uncomfortably close relationship with the General Services Administration (GSA), the government’s business and record-keeping agency; he also contributes campaign dollars to all the coffers of the members of Congress (irrespective of party affiliation) and maintains murky business ties to President Eddy Bullard. Moreover, an edifice Solomon built that now houses the Internal Revenue Service at Vulture’s Point on the Potomac is so poorly constructed it seems on the verge of collapse, a danger confirmed by Stone’s girlfriend (and obsessive lover of Kafka), Margo Danialson, a minor bureaucrat at GSA. Rothman unfurls a morbidly entangled conspiracy, one that includes murder, suicide, and a nuclear-energy scandal. In fact, there’s simply too much crammed into this novel, a surfeit of subplots, backstories, and dispensable characters. Still, Rothman captures the aura of dark nihilism in some quarters of the political world with great power. Here, Solomon casually acknowledges that his building will eventually fall: “Solomon shrugged and frowned like a pacifist accused of the My Lai massacre. ‘Of course it’s falling down. All buildings fall down someday. All people die someday.’” This is a riveting work, mordantly insightful and surprisingly entertaining.
A thoughtful and often comedically sharp reflection on political corruption.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798985181852
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.
An author is targeted by a fan who just can’t let her go.
Arden Bowie has had plenty of tragedy in her life, but now she’s finally on top. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Ohio to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She soon became part of their loving family and grew up to become a writer and bookseller. When her debut novel is published, she meets Dustin Dubecki at her first event. He showers her with praise, asks for writing advice, and wants to take her out for coffee. Arden tells herself he’s just a little awkward, but then he keeps showing up at her local events—and, even stranger, she’s sure she sees him lurking at her event in New York City. When he bursts into her apartment one night and assaults her, Arden’s calm life is shattered. Dustin gets a five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility; Arden spends most of that time rebuilding her sense of stability. Eventually, she moves to Oregon to start a new life where Dustin can never find her. But even though she has a beautiful home, a thriving career, a doting family, new friends, and even a potential love interest in a former cop named Gideon Riley, Arden can’t escape Dustin’s rage when his sentence is finally up. Roberts toggles between Arden’s point of view and Dustin’s, giving the reader occasional glimpses into his extremely twisted mindset. Although Arden’s attempts to escape Dustin are engrossing, the story stalls in the middle when far too many pages are dedicated to Arden purchasing and decorating a house. But the excitement picks back up when Dustin, a truly odious villain, re-enters the story. It’s also satisfying to see Arden grow into someone who refuses to be a victim, even as she deals with horrifying circumstances.
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250413581
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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