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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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