An expertly detailed, refreshingly quirky spin on the typical detective story.
Klingler offers a modern-day investigative thriller about a road trip gone awry.
Tommy Cuda has plans to drive the entirety of U.S. Route 66 in the “turbo-bronze metallic Plymouth Barracuda” that he inherited from his grandfather, which is all tuned up and ready to go. He leaves Chicago with “cash, a loose plan to reach the Pacific Ocean at some point, and no commitments to be anywhere” at any time. At a rest stop in Illinois, he meets a young woman with tarot cards; for $5, “Leni the Leviathan” offers to tell him his future. Tommy is intrigued, but before he can get his complete fortune, Leni runs away and hides in a restroom—because someone driving a Cadillac is apparently on her trail. Tommy offers Leni a ride to help her escape her pursuer; soon, she explains that she’s a college student and that her professor who raped her, Markus Corolla, is the person who’s after her. Leni gives Tommy directions to her friend Prof’s home in a small town near St. Louis. Prof is a hipster autodidact who loves high-tech devices. He allows Tommy and Leni to stay at his house while they figure out their next moves. It turns out that Leni has also been delivering boxes for a service run by Markus; her job is simple: deliver packages to or from Amazon lockers via an app called HappyBox. The boxes’ contents are a mystery and may be connected to illegal activity. Leni decides to hire Tommy as a private investigator, although he has no license for such things, and she does so for unclear reasons (“she never actually said why she needed a private eye”). Then Leni goes missing, leaving Tommy with only her phone.
As the plot unfolds, the narrative makes several unexpected diversions. For instance, Tommy, ever the technological skeptic, expresses his grim view of cellphones, noting that one’s “entire life” is being recorded “by an unseen entity.” He later plays guitar in a band, delivering a riveting version of Jimi Hendrix’s song “Fire” to a lively crowd at a bar called Toucan Sam’s, and he spins vinyl records in a special compartment in his Barracuda. He also goes to the gym with one of Prof’s friends, where he compares exercise equipment to Fender amplifiers, and Prof offers a lengthy description of his involvement with cryptocurrency. Although such bits slow the action, they create a memorable atmosphere in a tale that’s populated by offbeat characters. Tommy’s loose plan to help Leni certainly alters his equally loose plan to drive west, and he soon finds himself immersed in a world where he can not only show off his guitar chops, but also have conversations about such topics as the future of sex robots. He does all this while maintaining his upbeat personality and affection for jokes, such as one about how the word coward should mean “moving in the direction of a cow.” Meanwhile, the mystery plot features regular new developments as Tommy goes about “following the money” as an amateur PI.
An expertly detailed, refreshingly quirky spin on the typical detective story.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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