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
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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