For readers who dream of hit men whose barks are worse than their bites.
The savage gutting of a wine-and-spirits heiress in Washington Square Park brings Lt. Eve Dallas up against a baleful killer with both eyes firmly fixed on her husband and his family.
Wine distributor Jorge Tween shows so little emotion over the death of Galla Modesto, the wife he obviously married for her family’s money, that Eve and her partner, Detective Delia Peabody, instantly conclude that he’s behind her death. Since his home-monitoring system gives him a cast-iron alibi, it would be clear that he hired a contractor even if Eve’s husband, Roarke, hadn’t recognized a balefully familiar figure first staring at him, then running from the crime scene. The hit man is Lorcan Cobbe, an enforcer for Roarke’s late mobster father back in Dublin who’s convinced that he’s Patrick Roarke’s illegitimate son and that the billions Roarke made before and after he walked away from crime to marry Eve ought to be his. “This is almost too easy,” says Peabody, and she’s absolutely right. Once Eve and Peabody, in the most predictably entertaining sequence of this installment, have extracted a confession from Tween, it’s all Cobbe, all the time. Although the presumed killer has been a suspect or a person of interest in no less than 443 murders, his obsession with destroying Roarke and his relatives seems to lead him to act as incautiously and amateurishly as his client, and with a lot less excuse. Even the final sequence, in which Eve and Roarke take down the allegedly indestructible Cobbe, then turn him loose so that the two ancient antagonists can duke it out with bare fists, is comically anticlimactic.
For readers who dream of hit men whose barks are worse than their bites.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-25-020723-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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