A grand postwar adventure that’s dramatic, flashy, and pleasantly offbeat.
A skilled assassin tries to rescue British troops being held by a sadistic baron after World War I in Harries’ latest installment of his Tales of the Sica thriller series.
In 1920, Leon Harries is one of the best professional killers the British secret service has; he’s descended from a clan of assassins whose history goes back 2,000 years, and he knows his talents are incomparable. Capt. Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, chief of the foreign branch of the British Secret Intelligence Bureau, has an important mission for him. The Great War has ended, Europe is in disarray, and the dastardly Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg has kidnapped and taken control of a group of British soldiers. As the captain tells Leon, “We are talking about a man with the ability to rise from the depths of depravity and land on a level of deviancy and debauchery that hasn’t fouled the earth since Attila the Hun.” Leon would rather call it a day and pass his prized sica, or dagger, on to another family member, but the British need their boys back, and the baron is planning on invading Mongolia. Enter Countess Catherine von Merenberg, granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II, who’s a skilled pilot. She flies Leon over Europe and Asia in 400-mile hops, dodging warlords and imminent doom, until they reach their target: the horrible baron. Harries’ historical adventure gets off to a slow start, with background information and cameos from real-life figures such as Winston Churchill filling too much space when a more streamlined approach to the complicated narrative would have worked much better. That said, the work delivers enough historical pomp and bombast to make the story engaging and, at times, hair-raising even as it remains fully grounded in the realities of a postwar world. Throughout, the author displays a notable knack for spinning a yarn, and his story of a just assassin in a world of power-hungry warriors is inventive and tirelessly imaginative.
A grand postwar adventure that’s dramatic, flashy, and pleasantly offbeat.Pub Date: April 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781950628186
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
