An ambitious but ultimately predictable actioner.
In Carroll’s thriller, a recent law school graduate seeks revenge for his sister’s gang-related homicide.
It’s 2021, and Charlie Minto is looking forward to a bright future in El Paso, Texas, when tragedy strikes him again. A decade ago, when he was 16,his parents were killed by a drunk driver. Charlie worked through his grief by completing a tour in Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine, then graduated from the University of Texas School of Law. Now, he’s studying for his bar exam when he learns that members of a drug cartel murdered his sister, mistaking her for an enemy target. He has little faith in the ongoing police investigation and employs a group of vigilantes to address the crime in their own way. They use a whiteboard to track their targets: “One heading was CAPTURED/OUR CUSTODY and a second heading read CAPTURED/FBI CUSTODY.…The last column heading was KILLED, with no names or photos.” Before long, Charlie’s squad fills in this last column. Carroll’s novel aspires to be an action-packed thriller, offering many twists and turns to keep the reader engaged. However, many of the plot turns will be familiar to genre fans. As complications and moral dilemmas arise, readers may wonder why Charlie and his group didn’t foresee them from the start: What happens if there are witnesses? What happens if relatives, children, and people not directly involved in the cartel are put in harm’s way as they hunt the bad guys down? What happens if a member of Charlie’s team—who all have regular day jobs—is shot or killed? An obligatory romance is included between Charlie and Stephanie Reyes, who’s innocent of wrongdoing but whose brothers work for the cartel. Readers may find it difficult to believe that the couple falls in love so easily, considering that Charlie’s vigilante group is holding her hostage and going after members of her family.
An ambitious but ultimately predictable actioner.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798888248799
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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