A dark, provocative tale of crowdfunded violence that stretches the notion of revenge to its limits.
In Epperson’s thriller, a small-town police deputy and an FBI agent match wits with the mastermind behind a lethal website.
The urge to get even runs like a thread through popular culture: Creators who successfully harness that primal drive in their fiction have often built successful careers around it, such as Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino. However, the devil lies in revenge’s details, as author Epperson suggests in this technothriller, which is built around a simple yet hair-raising premise. On the popular and highly illegal KillStarter website, people can crowdfund and contract killings-for-hire at the click of a button: Dirty deeds done dirt cheap, with a high-tech twist. Users nominate potential targets, such as a drunken, bullying British lawyer or a racist, abusive American marketing consultant, and the murders are carried out, quickly and clinically, in return for bitcoin. For KillStarter’s creator—who, fittingly, remains anonymous for most of the book—the rewards lie in serving what they see as “the unseen hand shaping chaos, the mind orchestrating the unthinkable.” However, the game threatens to come undone after a viral frenzy breaks out around the nomination of a predatory Hollywood dealmaker, D’Wayne Robinson, who wastes no time barricading himself at his cliffside California home. The high-profile situation threatens to tear KillStarter’s tightly cordoned world apart. Monterey County Sheriff’s Deputy Lee Mann and FBI agent Miranda Walker have been investigating a string of murders related to the website and satisfying a public that loves KillStarter’s creator isn’t on their agenda. As Mann declares: “This isn't about liking him; It’s about upholding the system.”
Epperson does an artful job of navigating moral gray areas as the chase ratchets up and Robinson’s potential assassins, who continue zeroing in on their target, are revealed. If the book has a weakness, it’s the relative lack of character development that Mann, Walker, and their colleagues in law enforcement receive. Instead, Epperson sketches them out in broad strokes, as regular Joes and Janes trying to do the right thing. Aside from Mann’s grief over the loss of his wife to cancer and his fiery, if somewhat predictable, “situationship” with Miranda, readers get few glimpses into these characters’ emotional worlds. Similarly, Mann’s computer-expert sidekick, Moss Pendleton, comes across mainly as a relentlessly chipper techie who’s a fan of cinnamon pastries. It’s a disparity that stands in sharp contrast to the villains, whose feral desires for control “over life and death in a world gone rotten” are amply and chillingly detailed. That said, many cyberthriller devotees may see this imbalance as more of a feature than a bug, especially in light of the ambiguity that Epperson weaves around the KillStarter architect’s destiny. This volume could provide a solid foundation for a franchise to explore the moral issues that the author raises so effectively. As it is, it offers readers a rollercoaster ride that brings to mind the chaos of an ever-changing political climate.
A dark, provocative tale of crowdfunded violence that stretches the notion of revenge to its limits.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2025
ISBN: 9798232816827
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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