More a compromise than a synthesis, but nonetheless intriguing for all that.
Deaver and Maldonado’s first collaboration pits a Homeland Security investigator and her former quarry against a ring of serial killers working their way through California.
Special Agent Carmen Sanchez snaps to attention when her kid sister, Selina, is attacked and nearly killed, saved only by the intervention of a luckless good Samaritan. The crime seems random, but Carmen and Prof. Jacoby Heron, a super-hacker expert on intrusion—what he calls “someone or something deliberately entering into a place or situation where they’re unwelcome or uninvited”—she once investigated, soon link it to the very recent murder of real estate developer Walter Kemp in San Diego. The killer, identified to the sleuths by a spider tattoo on his wrist and to readers early on by the name Dennison Fallow, clearly has a plan that involves more victims, but what is that plan—and what does it have to do with cyberattacker Tristan Kane and the H8ers, a disgruntled group of men whose online whining about all the opportunities snatched away from them by the privileged few would make them pathetic if its consequences weren’t so lethal? Deaver evidently contributes the Chinese-box construction of the plot, in which the solution to each riddle seems to open new mysteries, and Maldonado provides a swiftly evoked sense of the characters’ social backgrounds. But it’s hard to tell which of them is responsible for the blistering pace, the numerous flashbacks to previous episodes that supply important details about the characters’ motivations at the cost of diluting that hard-won suspense, the stilted relationship between Carmen Sanchez and Jake Heron, or the sense of anticlimax that attends the last few revelations. A series seems inevitable.
More a compromise than a synthesis, but nonetheless intriguing for all that.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781662518713
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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