This absorbing mystery is a terrific introduction to the titular hero.
Small-town Pendleton, New York, becomes a hub for lies, murder, and conspiracy in Kreutz’s debut thriller and series launch.
Curt Cutler, a 38-year-old bank president, has long played a bizarre game with his identical twin brother, Cash. For a day or two each year, they “switch lives,” a ruse to which no one has ever caught on (“No matter what, we had to play this stupid game”). The game ends abruptly, however, in 2011, when Curt discovers his wife and Cash (pretending to be Curt) fatally shot in his home. He has no clue who the target was; did someone realize Cash was posing as Curt? Authorities suspect the surviving twin as well as Jake Chambliss (aka Jake Charm), Cash’s old friend who just recently returned to town after a decades-long absence. Curt and Jake look for someone with a motive, considering everything from a Mexican cartel’s potential involvement to whoever was trying to buy the bar that Cash owned and ran. But Jake, who may be a member of Special Forces, brings his own troubles. He’s privy to a coverup involving the Oklahoma City bombing, and a couple of corrupt FBI agents have seemingly trailed him to Pendleton. Kreutz effectively builds his mystery: the narrative initially focuses on Curt’s internal conflict as he struggles with not knowing whether he should admit who he is or continue “being Cash.” The well-drawn characters gradually complicate the narrative, including Cash’s girlfriend Skylar Meade and a news reporter who knows more about the Cutler twins than she probably should. The story ultimately shifts to center Jake, whose riveting scenes entail painstakingly shadowing people, suffering nightmares of his past, and rescuing someone who’s been taken captive. While the culprits behind other crimes, such as money laundering and another homicide, are easy to identify, that opening double murder remains an engrossing whodunit throughout. While the text includes violent imagery, the author rigidly avoids profanity, going so far as to censor a few bits of dialogue.
This absorbing mystery is a terrific introduction to the titular hero.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798889251781
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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