This melding of SF and financial manipulation creates an appealing, if overcrowded, thriller.
An SF financial thriller set in the near future focuses on a shady firm.
Rogers follows up his previous work, Fatal Score (2018), with this novel featuring the return of Louise “Weezy” Napolitani and Joe Mayfield. In the opening pages, Joe is at a job interview at the financial firm of Zhou, Cadwallon, and Gordon. Joe is famous in many circles for his computer trickery that garnered headlines. Still, the men in control of ZCG are not easy to impress. Most candidates possess Ivy League degrees and family connections; Joe has neither. Nevertheless, he gets hired and soon learns about the company’s main product known as “Skins.” The term refers to “a basket of financial derivatives designed to offset risk at the geographical source of a commodity.” What Joe doesn’t yet know are the lengths to which the company will go to make sure it controls the risks involved in its investments or how dastardly some of his superiors truly are. Good thing Joe has Weezy on his side. Weezy is both beautiful and has an IQ of 160+. She also has an important job with the government and the computer know-how to investigate ZCG. Of course, Joe and Weezy still find themselves buckled up for a bumpy ride. Communication implants, foldable electronic devices, and self-driving cars all play small but noticeable roles in this version of a not-too-distant world. Such technology is woven skillfully into Rogers’ narrative. The high-tech atmosphere never overshadows the timeless quality that fuels the action: human greed. And the main motivation of avarice and those willing to do anything for their own benefit produce some engaging friction. But the plethora of characters can at times be distracting. For instance, readers learn of Joe’s various co-workers early on. These players, despite their thinning ponytails or lengthy names, wind up being of little to no importance. In a similar vein, the late entry of a posse of hackers (with online handles like “Motormouth”) does not add much to the excitement. Yet all in all, Joe’s intriguing struggles prove just how violent, controlling, and downright dangerous even an advanced world can be.
This melding of SF and financial manipulation creates an appealing, if overcrowded, thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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