A raucously entertaining actioner with a sting of social satire.
A disgraced politician, a soldier of fortune, and a suburban mom take on a conspiracy to wreck civilization in this series-starting thriller.
Bond’s surprisingly plausible story envisions an America that’s been destabilized by the Blind Mice, a group of hacker anarchists bent on destroying corporations. Battling them on behalf of the American Dynamics conglomerate are security contractors Quaid Rafferty, a former Massachusetts governor who was impeached over a relationship with a sex worker, and his associate Durwood Oak Jones, a straight-arrow ex-Marine from Appalachia. They recruit Molly McGill, a single mom and private eye in New Jersey, to infiltrate the Mice. This requires her to become a celebrated left-leaning blogger and then navigate the collective’s Byzantine security protocols and tattoo rituals. Molly finds their leader Josiah, a young prophet given to long-winded rants against the system, to be a little “Crazy,” and their member Piper Jackson, a hacktivist trying to rescue her brother from an unjust prison sentence, to be idealistic. The Mice’s insurrection darkens when Josiah murders a health-management company executive and Piper unleashes a computer virus that wipes out most of the world’s data. The novel then swerves towards a more gonzo dystopia as chaos erupts, governments crumble, biker gangs set up highway checkpoints, and Fabienne Rivard, a dastardly Frenchwoman with ties to both the Mice and Quaid, positions her own sinister conglomerate to take over the world. Quaid, Durwood, and Molly duly target her Paris headquarters—a cross between a postmodern office park, a cutting-edge tech lab, and a medieval dungeon—where they face not only Fabienne’s minions, but also her organization’s bizarre scientific experiments.
Bond’s yarn, the first in his Third Chance Enterprises series, features crackerjack action scenes as well as a sly parody of the symbiosis between activist movements and the corporatocracy, all in vividly evocative prose: “His bones didn’t seem quite to fit, elbows and knees jangling liquidly,” Molly observes of the oddly charismatic Josiah. “He was impossible to look away from, his gait hypnotic, his kaleidoscopic limbs slashing the space between us.” The characters are colorful but rendered with complex nuance: Quaid, for example, is an obsequious, morally flexible showboat who’s confident that he can talk his way out of almost any situation; Durwood is a laconic technician with moral rectitude that can be too unyielding. Bond’s writing is well observed and engrossing in a range of registers, from tough-guy posturing—“I expect you’re wishing you had what hangs in my right trouser holster: a Webley top-break .455 caliber revolver”—to the perpetual uproar of Molly’s home life: “It started out smoky when I burned an omelet, distracted by the cat’s pre-vomit hacking in the hall. Then Zach and Granny had a pointless argument about when an egg became a chicken.” Even Durwood’s hound dog, Sue-Ann, makes an indelibly wheezy and sad-eyed impression. Faced with a world coming apart at the seams, Bond’s characters stitch it back together with a DIY verve that readers will likely find captivating.
A raucously entertaining actioner with a sting of social satire.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73225-527-2
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.
Second of the Walter Nash thrillers—following Nash Falls (2025)—in which the remade hero seeks vengeance.
Due to urgent circumstances, Nash has bulked himself up to become the “muscled and tatted fighting machine” now known as Dillon Hope. His antagonist is Victoria Steers, a global drug dealer who wants him dead. Not realizing his new identity, she enlists Hope to free her mother, Masuyo, from a prison in Myanmar. As an incentive, she shoots one of her associates and threatens to frame Hope for the murder unless he complies. She also wants him to find Nash. He in turn wants to kill Victoria to avenge the death of his innocent daughter, Maggie. “If I go down,” he muses, “I’m taking others with me. Starting with Victoria Steers.” He learns that Victoria had killed all her siblings to eliminate business competition. But as heartless as Victoria is, her mother, Masuyo, is even worse. In league with the Chinese government in a perverse plan to kill as many Americans as possible through fentanyl overdose, she shows contempt for Victoria for her perceived weaknesses. Readers won’t find many happy family relationships here: mother-daughter, father-son, husband-wife—all fraught. Hope’s employer, who accompanies him to Myanmar, is a billionaire chief executive with a dodgy past (i.e., probably killed his father). And there’s a mega-billionaire with an astronomical IQ and ditch-deep morals who, putting it mildly, does not have America’s best interests at heart. As a teenager, he’d defeated two world chess champions; as an adult, he regards his dealings with the world in terms of master chess moves. Only one character seems truly decent and credible—Hiroko, Victoria’s former nanny and lifelong companion, who provides Hope with valuable insights into the Steers’ background, which is partly Chinese. Searing grudges, simple evil, and not-so-simple misunderstandings carry the cast through this complex, action-packed plot. This sequel ties out the loose ends dangling in Nash Falls, which would be helpful to read first. To get to the requisite ending, though, Baldacci takes pains to surprise the reader. It works but often feels forced.
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781538758021
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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