Fans of Jack Reacher will love this saga featuring two badass heroes, though only one eats raw chicken for breakfast.
Wilson’s third installment in his Jackson Wade and Dog series follows the former Delta Force operative and his giant canine as they protect an American pop star performing in Thailand.
Jackson “Jax” Wade is enjoying a quiet life living as a “gentleman farmer” growing rice and apples in Chiang Mai alongside his Kuchi dog (fittingly called Dog), with whom he shares a deep and inexplicable psychic connection. When he’s asked to protect Rosie Tick—a popular American singer performing in Chiang Mai—he accepts, knowing that a delusional stalker whom Tick already has a restraining order against may be nearby. Wade stops the assailant before he can accost Tick as she’s partying at a local nightclub after the show, but the brutal beat-down is captured on video by numerous patrons, and the stalker is so humiliated that he vows revenge. Complicating matters is the wastrel son of an American senator (who has aspirations of running for president of the United States) who owes a substantial amount of money in gambling debts to a ruthless Russian crime cartel. To save his own skin, he tips the Russians off with details of a jewel-smuggling operation run by Lily Sullivan, a powerful businesswoman nicknamed the Queen of Jade. Sullivan hires Jax after she’s blackmailed. With numerous criminal groups targeting Wade, he uses his deep connection with his almost supernatural dog to lay down some karmic retribution.
The author delivers a page-turning blend of military fiction and mainstream thriller in this work. In addition to his breakneck pacing and adeptly choreographed action sequences, Wilson has an effortlessly fluid writing style. The elite level of understanding, experience, and military insight the author—a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force—brings to the table is obvious. Here’s just one of countless examples: “I carried a Beretta M9. I like the Sig Sauer P365, but I’ve never used it in a close-in gunfight. In the [Special Operations Group], my primary weapon was a suppressed Sig Sauer MCX-SPEAR LT. It had a telescoping stock and held a twenty-round mag.” While the numerous plotlines get a bit convoluted in spots, the strength of Wilson’s prose compensates. He’s acutely aware of the power of a good phrase—so much so that every chapter is titled with a particularly memorable quote from its text. Additionally, most chapters include revelatory, bombshell-delivering sentences, any one of which could serve as a perfect catchphrase for book cover copy. (Here are just a few examples: “If you hunt the pack, the pack hunts you”; “What can the Tiger Master do for you?”; “If you come for the Queen, don’t miss.”) Wade’s brief carnal experiences, while entertaining, seem a bit unnecessary and unsustainable—but that may be the point. (From one love interest: “Like always, time is against us, and our paths are going in a different direction. You and Dog are where you belong, as I am.”)
Fans of Jack Reacher will love this saga featuring two badass heroes, though only one eats raw chicken for breakfast.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9798268808865
Page Count: 374
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.
Second of the Walter Nash thrillers—following Nash Falls (2025)—in which the remade hero seeks vengeance.
Due to urgent circumstances, Nash has bulked himself up to become the “muscled and tatted fighting machine” now known as Dillon Hope. His antagonist is Victoria Steers, a global drug dealer who wants him dead. Not realizing his new identity, she enlists Hope to free her mother, Masuyo, from a prison in Myanmar. As an incentive, she shoots one of her associates and threatens to frame Hope for the murder unless he complies. She also wants him to find Nash. He in turn wants to kill Victoria to avenge the death of his innocent daughter, Maggie. “If I go down,” he muses, “I’m taking others with me. Starting with Victoria Steers.” He learns that Victoria had killed all her siblings to eliminate business competition. But as heartless as Victoria is, her mother, Masuyo, is even worse. In league with the Chinese government in a perverse plan to kill as many Americans as possible through fentanyl overdose, she shows contempt for Victoria for her perceived weaknesses. Readers won’t find many happy family relationships here: mother-daughter, father-son, husband-wife—all fraught. Hope’s employer, who accompanies him to Myanmar, is a billionaire chief executive with a dodgy past (i.e., probably killed his father). And there’s a mega-billionaire with an astronomical IQ and ditch-deep morals who, putting it mildly, does not have America’s best interests at heart. As a teenager, he’d defeated two world chess champions; as an adult, he regards his dealings with the world in terms of master chess moves. Only one character seems truly decent and credible—Hiroko, Victoria’s former nanny and lifelong companion, who provides Hope with valuable insights into the Steers’ background, which is partly Chinese. Searing grudges, simple evil, and not-so-simple misunderstandings carry the cast through this complex, action-packed plot. This sequel ties out the loose ends dangling in Nash Falls, which would be helpful to read first. To get to the requisite ending, though, Baldacci takes pains to surprise the reader. It works but often feels forced.
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781538758021
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
