Energetic action, a tricky plot, and political analysis are not always comfortable together.
To finance a better future, some comrades in arms steal a lot of money.
Under the aegis of Army Gen. Tommy Taylor, a group of soldiers steals more than $2 billion, intended for bribes in Syria, to help advance the career of Nebraska's junior senator, Ben Corn. Naturally, there are some not-very-ordinary people involved: CIA agent Greta Webb is beautiful, worldly, brilliant, sexually omnivorous, practiced in the art of deception, and lethal in several disciplines, while Don Carter, in charge of security, has raised paranoia to an art form. Also present at the heist, though not a member of the group, is Fyodor Volk, head of the Parsifal Group—a Blackwater-like paramilitary organization—and one of Vladimir Putin's favorite minions. Parsifal had contracted to provide backup security for the operation, and Volk quickly figures out what is being stolen and initiates a close relationship with Webb and the money. It turns out that having $2 billion is not the same as spending $2 billion, and a lot of exposition is provided on the various ways of moving large sums into mainstream economies. Finally, the group settles on using a hedge fund, and thus Industrial Strategies and Elias Vicker, Wall Street's most psychopathic billionaire, enter the plot. Vicker spins out of control, Volk crashes the party, it turns out that in the world of really big money everyone knows everyone else, and the convolutions of allegiance and plot are dark and tangled. The narrative is further burdened with analyses of American policy failures in several areas: military action, foreign relations, social initiative, and more. These ostensibly demonstrate what a fresh and clear vision Corn possesses (and most of the others share with him), but sometimes they feel a little extracurricular. Perhaps to compensate the reader for time spent in the desert, the action sequences are especially violent and bloody and the sex scenes, extravagant. Much of the digressive material could have been edited, at the cost of toning down the aggressive didacticism, but if you start with $2 billion, what is excess?
Energetic action, a tricky plot, and political analysis are not always comfortable together.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982156-02-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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