A stylish, stuffed-to-the-gills crime novella.
Stolen cash attracts a rogues’ gallery in Kushnir’s crime novella.
John is the pastor at the nearly bankrupt Church of St. Jude, and he isn’t sure how he’s going to continue to feed the eight orphans who reside in the basement. Little does he know the answer to his prayers is hurtling toward him—$5 million in cash—propelled by a series of compounding criminal acts. The money comes from the all-powerful state senator Red, who seems to think the best way to help the poor is to cut their social services while enriching himself with corporate kickbacks. When his trophy wife, Mila, runs off with the loot to start a new life on a tropical island, Red sends his number one goon, Vinnie, to retrieve her and the boodle. (Vinnie, who has no problem using a rusty old spoon to extort his victims, shares wisdom like “Debts are like kids. If you don’t raise ’em right on time, they grow up and start biting you in the throat.”) By the time Vinnie catches up with Mila, the money has already been stolen by a pair of hapless stick-up artists, and soon many other people are after it, including a pair of corrupt cops, a triad assassin, a sword-bearing nun, a seasoned fixer, and a poisoner with impeccable aesthetic taste. (“Suffering should be poetic, like Dostoevsky,” opines the poisoner. “Blood on the floor ain’t tragedy—it’s bad interior design.”) Though not formatted like a screenplay, the narrative is presented cinematically, complete with voice-over narration, camera directions, references to Guy Ritchie films, and vivid present-tense descriptions, like this one of John’s church: “The facade is peeling like an old boxer’s skin after a thousand losses. Inside—dampness soaking everything, from the pews to the Bible. Plastic angels from Walmart stand on the altar, their wings yellowed with age.” Fans of crime-centric graphic novels may particularly enjoy this tale, which reads like several issues of a comic book boiled down to 60 pages of crackling prose.
A stylish, stuffed-to-the-gills crime novella.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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