An often grim but engrossing tale of self-preservation and brutal vengeance.
A capable, lethal woman vows revenge against the men who abducted and assaulted her in this thriller sequel.
LeAnn Haddad’s flight from San Francisco to Singapore isn’t a vacation. She’s wanted for murder and aims to hide in her brother’s safe house. But a sex trafficker at the Singapore airport is already on the hunt. He grabs LeAnn and restrains her in a dingy room, where men drug and rape her. She manages to escape and has no qualms about killing her captors in the process. But she wants retribution against the one in charge, whom she calls the Clean Man (“The Clean Man was going to pay”). Meanwhile, law enforcement Superintendent Kwan Kim Lai has been investigating numerous reports of missing tourists in the area. When suspects start turning up dead, he guesses that a former kidnap victim is taking out sex traffickers. He hopes to arrest these men before the killer gets a hold of them, although it won’t be easy—not with the powerful Clean Man determined to protect himself and his deplorable ring. LeAnn, who had a smaller role in Shaw’s series opener, Lieutenant Trufant (2022), proves to be a vivid, complex antihero. She’s a coldblooded and efficient killer but vulnerable as well. LeAnn battles her addiction to the drugs the kidnappers gave her and reluctantly empathizes with other abductees. The author tempers some of the violence—for instance, by implying much of the sex traffickers’ torture of LeAnn. The bloodier scenes are reserved for the pitiless kidnappers, but they still aren’t excessively graphic. The author’s taut narrative deftly showcases suspenseful moments, such as Kwan’s continuing investigation, which is not far behind LeAnn’s deadly spree, and signs of the Clean Man’s far-reaching connections (for example, loyal henchmen overseas). Nevertheless, the absorbing story’s highlights involve LeAnn’s impressive surveillance, as she smartly tracks down sex traffickers to get closer to the titular villain, who quite frankly deserves whatever she has planned.
An often grim but engrossing tale of self-preservation and brutal vengeance.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781665305969
Page Count: 288
Publisher: BookLogix
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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