Fast, fun, and weird.
In 1994, Aloysius Pendergast begins his FBI career in his hometown of New Orleans, where his boss doesn’t want him, as Preston and Child take him back to his first case.
Dwight Chambers, Pendergast’s new partner and mentor, quickly realizes that his mentee “played by his own rule book,” often not troubling with FBI procedure. Early on, a corpse is discovered with its right arm severed—with considerable microsurgical precision, observes Pendergast, leading to Sherlock Holmes–level deductions about the killer. But motive? Ah, that’s the fundamental mystery. Meanwhile, a courier named Proctor is kidnapped and kept in a dark room where a disembodied voice tells him he must eat well and not hurt himself. At first, Proctor has no clue about the perpetrator’s motive but concludes he’s insane. The one-time military colleague of Pendergast seems to have no resources, but he’s determined to escape. Will he die trying? The plot is strange, likely unique, and suits Pendergast perfectly—he’s slender, pale as a ghost, and always dressed in a tailored black suit. He’s also quick-fingered, honey-tongued, and capable of necessary violence. Oh yes, and he oozes old New Orleans money of unspecified origin—witness his 1959 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith—although his recent ancestry shows criminals and mountebanks. He lives in a bayou on Penumbra Plantation and peppers his conversations with words like homunculi, lacunae, and sui generis. By-the-book Chambers can scarcely believe his junior partner practices a form of deep meditation called Chongg Ran as part of his investigative process. Occasionally Pendergast’s actions lean toward the paranormal, stretching credulity. Not only that, he hears so well that he “could detect even a fly farting.” All of this makes him one of the strangest and most entertaining crime fighters in modern fiction. Just as he describes the killer, Pendergast himself is sui generis.
Fast, fun, and weird.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781538765746
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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