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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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