A crime drama that offers a winning combination of thrills, defeats, and hard-earned victories.
In Weber’s thriller, a Canadian Mountie from the northern tip of Nova Scotia confronts her unsettling past while investigating local disturbances with potentially international implications.
The hamlet of Meat Cove gets its name from the carcasses that marauding Vikings once tossed into the sea at the northern tip of Cape Breton. Fundy Sutherland, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, lives a complicated life there with her 16-year-old daughter, Skye, and her married lover, Pascal. She also has a secret past as a Canadian Armed Forces “sniper with kills on four continents.” Her cruel mother, Geneva, who had a temper that “could melt a Coke bottle,” ran off on Fundy’s fifth birthday, leaving her alone with an alcoholic, unemployed father. After a well-off local family with three boys took her in, Fundy became fiercely competitive, excelling in sports and winning the Junior National Championship in the biathlon. Skye’s latest school assignment, requiring an at-home DNA test, sends Fundy into panic mode, as it could reveal aspects of her life that she’d rather stay hidden. In addition, a criminal whom Fundy helped to put in prison six years ago has been released—and he appears headed for Meat Cove. Adding to her worries are sightings of two Venezuelan boats, which may be carrying drugs. Weber’s novel is populated with colorful, sharply drawn characters—especially Fundy, a no-nonsense cop who describes herself as “like Dudley Do-Right and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, but instead of a horse, I ride a Taurus. And I wear a bra.” Also of note is Snuki Finsterblast, Skye’s science teacher: “the only woman in Cape Breton with a worse name than mine” says Fundy, and who dyes her long gray hair “black, but only once a year.” The author also appealingly shows Fundy’s relationship with Pascal to be loving and physical, marked by mutual acceptance of occasional absences and divided loyalties. The story moves quickly, shifting back and forth in time, with much of Fundy’s past revealed through passages she writes to Skye, detailing a life that’s both harrowing and exhilarating.
A crime drama that offers a winning combination of thrills, defeats, and hard-earned victories.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781967458325
Page Count: -
Publisher: Seacoast Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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