An irresistible, high-stakes, cross-country adventure about a man with amazing gifts.
Seaborne’s thriller features the return of superpowered action hero Will Stewart.
In this 10th installment in his contemporary adventure series, the author continues the exploits of Will Stewart, an air charter pilot, and his wife, Andy, a detective in Wisconsin’s Essex County Police Department (characterized by her husband as “an equal opportunity juggernaut of justice”). Will and Andy are briefed by FBI Special Agent Leslie Carson-Pelham and her colleagues on the inner workings of a paramilitary insurgency group known as Company W (“The W stands for White and the military grade high-capacity semiautomatic rifles they carry promise supremacy of arms, if not intellect”). Will and Andy have had near-fatal encounters with Company W before and have always been stymied by the compartmentalized nature of the group. “It’s not an organization with a headquarters,” they’re told by Carson-Pelham. “It’s like a cloud or a fog moving across the landscape. Arch conservativism. Racism. White supremacy. Grievance. Fascism by a dozen different names.” The couple are swept up in a complex plot involving the desperate plight of children in a hospice program, with tendrils of corruption and evil extending from Galveston to the Florida Keys. The narrative includes a number of suspicious figures, some of them connected to an evil pharmaceutical company that will arouse readers’ suspicions right from the start. Though the narrative gives a generous amount of the spotlight to Andy, Will is a natural scene-stealer by virtue of his actual superpowers: He can both fly and vanish from sight.
Considering the outsized, comic-book premise, it continues to be downright amazing how grounded Seaborne’s world consistently feels. Yes, Will Stewart has some Marvel-style paranormal gifts, but both his abilities and personality are so thoroughly fleshed out and believable that, in no time at all, the reader matter-of-factly integrates these fantastical elements into the standard heroics-and-gunfire action without a second thought. “This isn’t one of your silly action movies where all the clues line up in the third reel,” Andy deadpans. “It’s hundreds of hours of boring investigative work, connecting dots, scouring phone records, scraping through emails and texts, building cases.” This latest entry in the series maintains the same grounded, workaday feeling, but both Will and Andy consistently strain against it—they’re full-fledged action heroes, always ready to respond with Hollywood-style quips and larger-than-life violence. The author effectively fleshes out even minor walk-on characters, and his portrayal of the loving relationship between his two heroes continues to be the most satisfying aspect of the series, the kind of three-dimensional adult relationship remarkably rare in thrillers like this one. The author’s skill at pacing is razor-sharp—the book is a compulsive page-turner right up until the obligatory exposition dump near the end. The descriptions of the actual workings of Will’s powers are uniformly gripping; it makes the book feel like the best possible combination of the Odd Thomas novels of Dean Koontz and the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child.
An irresistible, high-stakes, cross-country adventure about a man with amazing gifts.Pub Date: May 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781958005781
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Trans World Data
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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PERSPECTIVES
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
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