A provocative story as dramatically thrilling as it is thoughtful.
In Riaz’s thriller, a government agent attempts to find the son he lost in the aftermath of the United States’ transformation into an Islamic nation.
Jamal Stone has seen his country rent asunder: After an Islamic terrorist organization engulfed America in violent conflict, China refused to buy U.S. treasury bonds, sending the economy into a death spiral. Now, the nation—renamed the Islamic States of America and ruled by a Muslim caliphate—is divided into two warring parts: the West State, which is a stable Islamic land, and the East State, where American patriots continue to resist, a terrifying future made bracingly plausible by the author. Initially, Stone had worked against the Islamic insurgency for the CIA; he was recruited because, as a Muslim, he could infiltrate the enemy. Exhausted by the toll of unending war, saddened over the deaths of his father and wife (the results of a drone strike and a riot, respectively), and anguished over the disappearance of his 3-year-old son, Khalil, he defected to the other side. However, his placid, domestic life in the West State—one in which he achieves a “level of tempered evenness”—is upended when he receives a video from an anonymous sender showing Khalil, now 10 years old. In dramatically gripping fashion, the author chronicles Stone’s dangerous mission to find Khalil in the East State, a sojourn that threatens the new life he has built working for the Islamic Ministry of Central Intelligence away from the front lines. Riaz’s dystopian setting is richly conceived; he convincingly constructs the peculiar contours of a new nation and its extraordinary cultural landscape. Stone’s marriage, a union arranged by the government after the death of his first wife, is explored with remarkable subtlety. As he searches for his son, Stone must come to grips with the true nature of his allegiance to the caliphate and the possibility that his peaceful existence is an “unrealistic aspiration or outright illusion.”
A provocative story as dramatically thrilling as it is thoughtful.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 473
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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