A somewhat plausible but bleak work that paints any bright light as an oncoming train.
An idealistic academic finds himself gobsmacked by the truth about power in this frightening piece of speculative fiction.
Graduate student Nick loves nothing more than debating the value of the Electoral College with his colleague Sarah. His orderly world gets upended when Claire, a political strategist who graduated from the same university, gives Nick a peek behind the curtain of power. Claire introduces him to Sen. Redd, a longtime corrupt politician who knows where all the bodies are buried. Redd needs an assistant, one whose main duties will be writing Orwellian speeches to distract voters. Nick decides to accept so he can learn about Redd’s organization and bring it down. Sarah fears he’s lost his way, and Nick gets taken to a secret island where politicians and business and military leaders scheme about how to rule America by misleading its gullible citizenry. Redd and tech mogul Eliot Vane spend hours detailing their coalition’s methods, expecting to bring Nick firmly on board. Yet Nick resists, trying without success to weave warnings into the treatises he’s writing, which keep getting flagged by Vane’s algorithms. At last, he creates one more work to alert the world. Author Kushnir certainly draws inspiration from a deeply divided United States. This gloomy novel won’t encourage those depressed by the country’s current state of affairs; Kushnir’s narrative reinforces the worst fears about deep-state conspiracies. The villains of the piece simply practice sleight of hand, as explained by Sen. Redd: “That crap made of slogans about morality, freedom, equality—we scatter it like breadcrumbs to pigeons so they peck and don’t fly too high, don’t see the sky belongs to us, not them?” Unfortunately, the prose abounds with such self-aggrandizing monologues. Also, protagonist Nick is naïve enough to believe he can bring down a system that’s existed for decades all by himself, with just his inspiring words. While Kushnir makes a successful, thought-provoking argument for such a shadow government with the story’s many believable scenarios, this dark vision of democracy won’t resonate with everyone.
A somewhat plausible but bleak work that paints any bright light as an oncoming train.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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