An intriguing, tangled espionage drama.
CIA agent Helena Deane, compromised in a web of lies with Russian agents, flashes back during a D.C. interrogation about how the whole labyrinth ended in violence and death.
Helena Deane is in CIA counterintelligence, with deep knowledge of traitors to the state and how to hunt them. But her own role is problematic: As an Indian American woman whose brown skin made her family a target after 9/11, she’s disaffected toward both the government and her fieldwork in a fictional developing nation. She’s been blackmailed and has fed information to and done favors for a Russian operative. By most definitions, she herself is a traitor. Her department was tasked with rooting out a Vladimir Putin “mole” in the American intelligence network. Has Helena been accidentally assigned to discover herself? No, there must be another turncoat, even deeper undercover, who aims to remove Helena from the gameboard. At the outset, a gathering of suspects at a safe house leads to death and disarray among Helena’s team. In the aftermath, the CIA grills Helena and her husband, FBI agent David Deane—who, it so happens, has been investigating Helena as well. Daye, whose previous book was A Stellar Spy (2025), spins this cerebral espionage drama-thriller with the inquest-flashbacks presented in reverse-chronological order. This approach may drive readers to comb through the pages to find foreshadowing they might have missed. Daye is an admirer of John le Carré, who gets name-checked here, so her emphasis is far less on suspense/action and more on inner psychological turmoil and angsty relationships among a cast of international characters degraded by deceit (romantic as well as governmental) and doubt. The labyrinthine, sometimes long-winded, result requires readers to wade/trudge through the effects before they know the cause. Typical reverse-chron narratives hinge on the protagonists’ evolution from innocence and youthful idealism to cynicism and regret. When applied to the spy games here, however, guilt and moral failure hang over the material no matter how far back one goes, like original sin.
An intriguing, tangled espionage drama.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9798330470020
Page Count: 428
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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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