Queer erotica with an absurd premise, pulpy fight scenes, and a few serious messages.
Carter offers an over-the-top gay erotic sendup of the secret-agent genre.
In a novel full of bawdily named characters, including Dutch operative Phillip Mihol, Bulgarian Ilov Giandik, and villainous Spanish mastermind Manuel Azramar, Vietnam-born spy Don Kee Dong sets out on a world-spanning mission to infiltrate a shadowy criminal enterprise known as HO. The espionage story is definitely secondary to the sex scenes involving the well-endowed hero, which are nonstop—and that’s the point, as Carter himself explains in an author’s note, in which he says that the novel is intended as a response to the antigay bias he experienced as a working librarian; he calls his book a “sexy adventure” that’s “all pure globetrotting queer joy!” But try as he might to simply be as provocative as an author could possibly hope to be, Carter succeeds in infusing the sexcapades with some substantive weight as well. Sure, it’s a world of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling sex, but that’s not all it is; the book also shows a clear renunciation and rebuke of sexual assault amid the wildness. The narrative’s tongue-in-cheek tone is so pervasive that sudden serious allusions, as when Dong is asked to reconsider HO’s true nature, can be jarring: “I won’t say they’re all good, but during various purges such as the Inquisition and the Holocaust, HO saved countless lives,” says Mihol. “HO got thousands of queers and Jews out of Nazi Germany alone, and not only their members.” There’s also a lot of two-fisted violence in another nod to the secret-agent genre—particularly the brutality of Ian Fleming’s James Bond capers: “I went in as if to punch with my left and instead I threw dirt in his eyes with my right. I then broke his kneecap. That’ll hurt, I thought. As if on cue, he screamed in pain. I punched him again in the windpipe.”
Queer erotica with an absurd premise, pulpy fight scenes, and a few serious messages.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781970702002
Page Count: 174
Publisher: LA Notable Books
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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