An often engrossing crime saga that’s bound to be polarizing.
A career criminal falls back into a life of guns and drugs in Smith’s thriller.
Winston “Wince” Fisher Jr. is in a rut. After his daughter was born, Wince tried to leave his high-octane life of crime behind for a safe career in wealth management, but then his business partner forced him out, and he signed a two-year noncompete clause. Now, the former criminal and three-time divorcé has nothing to do but laze around his rental home in Austin, Texas, watching action movies and consuming massive amounts of cocaine. Everything changes when his dealer’s son invites him to assist on a drug run, which makes Wince miss his old ways. Soon enough, he’s building and selling AR-15s to Mexican cartels, leading to another decision that could jeopardize his chance at ever having a normal life. Smith’s second novel, following Arcade (2016), is a significant pivot, offering a portrait of red-blooded Southern masculinity. It’s hard to tell exactly what sort of satire is intended; Wince’s highly traditional worldview is rarely subverted or challenged, and many of the women and nonwhite characters are little more than thinly drawn caricatures. Still, the book is compulsively readable, building an air of paranoia and dread that persists whether Wince has been caught in a shootout or simply talking on the phone with his mother. The story shines in its asides, from footnotes detailing the intricacies of gun barrels and drug laws to brief flashbacks that fill in Wince’s outlandish backstory—complete with DeNigris’ occasional charming hand-drawn illustrations. The tale is certainly not for the faint of heart, taking readers on an antihero’s journey through a wasteland of sex, drugs, violence, and organized crime. But as a snapshot of a very specific type of man in the 2020s, it transcends its standard revenge-thriller trappings to offer a compelling character study.
An often engrossing crime saga that’s bound to be polarizing.Pub Date: July 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798998955129
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Itna Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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