A perfect balance of old style and new, high art and low. Here’s hoping there’s a sequel.
A unique investigator, an unusual setting, and a high-stakes, well-crafted mystery.
Lake Harlowe knows the burden of trying to outrun a traumatic past. Maybe this is what led her to join the foreign service, where she works to support American citizens who travel abroad and run into any kind of trouble. Her previous post in Phnom Penh just a few weeks behind her, Lake is beginning to lean into her new appointment in Wellington, New Zealand, when she receives a death notification for a wealthy American, seemingly from an accidental overdose. Her call to his family, who owns the Trophy casino in Las Vegas, is combative and volatile, and leaves her spent—until she gets a call that another young American, also from Las Vegas and with ties to the Trophy, has gone missing: Bowie Bishop, an aspiring musician. Through emotional phone calls with Bowie’s mother, the aging rocker-turned-cocktail-waitress Suzie, and her own investigation into the people closest to Bowie—her host family in Wellington; a dashing local musician with whom she shared the stage a time or two; an American expatriate music producer—Lake finds herself drawn deeper and deeper into something dark that may have already swallowed Bowie whole. Having grown up in a cult in Alaska, Lake is no stranger to darkness, and she has closed herself off from making personal connections outside of her irascible three-legged cat. But something about Bowie’s case gets under her skin—as does handsome Kiwi police officer Mason Yates. In tone as well as character, Nash successfully builds a modern noir here. Lake, like any good noir detective, desperately tries to armor herself against hurt, but it’s her vulnerability and woundedness that makes her good at her job. It’s also her (or Nash’s) poetic way with descriptions and metaphors that echo masters of the genre like Chandler: “I close my eyes and corpses wash across the darkness like nightmare northern lights.”
A perfect balance of old style and new, high art and low. Here’s hoping there’s a sequel.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781668098370
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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