Dark and swiftly moving, both a thriller and an examination of how deep a connection can be.
Lost in grief, a widow has only herself to trust as she searches for her missing dog as a last connection to her husband while she seeks the truth about his death.
Junie Lagarde’s husband, Olivier, was an in-demand safety consultant. Ever since his Cessna 172 went down during an assessment of the tunnel system around Mont Blanc, in the French Alps, Junie has had a hard time engaging with the world around her without a link to her lost love. She knows a connection is out there because Junie and Olivier’s beloved dog, Leo, survived the crash and stayed by Olivier’s side until his death. Determined to find Leo, Junie repeatedly returns to Chamonix to search for him, and the small town’s residents become familiar with the American who’s looking for her vulpine dog. After nine long months of waiting, Junie gets a call from Capitaine Philippe Brevard, who’s leading the investigation into the crash. He lets her know there’s been a sighting of Leo—and that the dog is not alone. Brevard shares a video of a strange man walking Leo, a man clad in Olivier’s distinctive coat. When Junie finally meets this man, she’s confused, disgusted, alarmed, and afraid, but she has no doubt that this man’s pose as Olivier is dangerous and that there’s more to her husband’s death than she knew. Was Olivier’s death a murderous act of eco-terrorism, or did it stem from more personal motives? Junie has Brevard’s support in seeking the truth and rescuing Leo from his captor. But the search for Leo and the details surrounding Olivier’s death lead her to question everyone around her, leaving her dependent on her own intuition to lead her to answers.
Dark and swiftly moving, both a thriller and an examination of how deep a connection can be.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781448309931
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
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