A cynical, funny spin on spycraft.
A series of murders begets this quirky spy thriller.
As the narrator points out, this is a murder story before it’s a spy story. Nine critics of the Iranian regime have been assassinated over several years, and British Intelligence must find the killer code-named CASPIAN and stop a hostile state from murdering innocent people on European soil. Expert parliamentary researcher Aphra McQueen is brought in to investigate an anonymous complaint of gross negligence in the Intelligence Service’s handling of the issue. In her interview, she says, “Let me speak directly to God.” “But my dear, you already are,” replies Sir William Rentoul, who as Head of the Service runs an organization with “decades upon decades of experience in frustrating outsiders intent on getting to the bottom of things.” In six months, he faces retirement, which he expects will be “a slow decline offset by sudokus and fish oil.” Lacking sufficient security clearance to be on her own in headquarters, Aphra needs Susan, a resentful escort, to take her to her desk. Poor Susan once aspired to global covert action but has advanced no further than building escort, a job likened to something a plumber would find when unblocking a toilet. She plants a classified file in Aphra’s bag, hoping to get the more successful woman fired. The omniscient narrator has a jaded view of the characters. He tells the reader, “I’d rather you didn’t believe that I’m the spirit of spying, to be honest. That would suit me just fine.” A lowercase-g god he is, though, as he pries into the lives of other oddball characters. Zak, a dentist, volunteers to be a spy, as he’s learned a lot from library books on the subject. When he meets Aphra, he asks, “Do you have a badge or something?” “A badge?” “To identify you as—you know, as a spy.” Later he explains, “There’s something divine, something godlike about spying.” As for fiction, though, he thinks, “Anyone who chooses writing spy novels over spying itself can’t have been much good in the first place.”
A cynical, funny spin on spycraft.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780802167675
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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