Best for readers who love a plot-driven tale; anyone wanting more depth should look elsewhere.
A cast of grotesques populates this wild tale of a newbie bounty hunter who goes from bad to worse.
“Daytime is the wrong time to go ferreting out folks like the Drumgooles….You’ve got to go after them nonchalantly. Go with the element of surprise.” That advice is directed to Moses Kincaid, a former military policeman who figures bounty hunting will be a good fit for his skillset. It should be a fairly straightforward job to find bail jumper Eric Drumgoole Jr., who’s on the lam after mowing down two members of the Filthy Thirteen motorcycle gang, but this bunch of “Odin-worshipping white supremacist bikers” give Moe no end of trouble. He has a bad run-in with them that would have been much worse if he didn’t have Elise, a waitress with a heart of gold, to nurse him back to health. Drumgoole is one of several jumpers Moe pursues across these pages in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. Tromblay captures the antics and characters of trailer park denizens, sadists, dwarf wrestlers on angel dust, venomous snakes, wandering buffalo, roller derby girls, and other denizens of America’s dusty margins. He also spotlights the racism that dogs Moe, who is Native American, at every turn. A sudden tragedy causes his trajectory to change, everything goes sideways when a jumper dies in his custody, and Moe lands in Big Mac, the toughest penitentiary in Oklahoma. He has a chance to get his freedom back, however, if he can find out who is involved with trafficking an extremely lethal drug. Tromblay doles out violence in Tarantino-sized portions—“all crash and no brakes,” as Moe would say. Considering how much bad stuff happens to him, Moe is perhaps too unfazed. He’s not deep or complex; he just goes from one disaster to the next. His story is light on reflection and heavy on the action.
Best for readers who love a plot-driven tale; anyone wanting more depth should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781938603389
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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