A propulsive, bighearted thriller that celebrates fierce maternal love.
In Bronson’s thriller, a family is thrust into danger when a mother’s covert past catches up with her.
Las Vegas mom Jessie Baltimore has a secret past: She used to fight bad guys for a shadowy organization called The Agency. As her teenage sons, Max and Sean, grow older, Jessie starts to question her purpose in life as her past begins to resurface. While his computer is being repaired, Max receives a mysterious flash drive containing a tranche of secret data. Soon enough, Jessie and her sons are being chased through the desert by a gang—led by the tough but haunted Papa, who is accompanied by Victor (his son), a man named Oscar, and a bumbling newbie, Charlie—in hot pursuit. They want to recover the drive and eliminate anyone who might have seen what’s on it. Jessie’s long-dormant training carries her family through car chases, long treks through the desert, and high-pressure shootouts. Memories of her old life rise to the surface, and her sons—terrified but fascinated—come to see their mother in a new light. Meanwhile, Papa’s boss, the powerful, mysterious Romeo, follows events from afar. Luckily, Jessie has backup from Jonathan, her former lover and partner at The Agency. His reappearance in Jessie’s life ignites old feelings and leads her to revisit (though not regret) her choice to leave her high-risk lifestyle and become a mother. The story is compelling—the wild, well-crafted action plot is enriched by family drama. Jessie’s pleasure at being immersed in the action again is intriguingly complicated by her need to keep her children safe; the storytelling is at its best when Jessie battles the tension between following her killer instincts and listening to “the roar of protective fury in her heart.” Max and Sean (who is on the spectrum) are believable teenage boys, and the ways in which they grow to appreciate their mother are unexpected and tender. Other than the hapless Charlie, the bad guys are less well drawn, and Romeo’s infrequent and vague presence drains the plot of some of its urgency. Still, readers looking for some brisk thrills with emotional weight will find this a satisfying ride.
A propulsive, bighearted thriller that celebrates fierce maternal love.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9798999346704
Page Count: 405
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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