An entertaining page-turner that mixes punchy shootouts with resonant soul-searching.
A reporter confronts terrorists, the Mafia, and fertility issues in Ebner’s thriller-series starter.
Teagan Penn is a 37-year-old Seattle journalist with a prominent facial dog-bite scar and a talent for drawing out celebrities in soul-baring interviews. Her own soul is troubled by her and her husband Todd’s inability to conceive a child and by news of nearly daily atrocities committed by KIL, an Islamic terrorist group. When KIL starts kidnapping and enslaving girls in the Middle East, Teagan’s frustrated maternal instincts prod her to launch a personal rescue mission of her own. She strikes a deal with a shadowy crime lord named Roman to raise $12 million, which he is to use to mount a mercenary operation called Project Rebound to rescue the girls. The caper goes awry before it even gets going, and after Teagan goes to Paris to untangle it, her hotel is attacked by KIL commandos bent on slaughtering all the guests. When she gets on the phone with Roman, he implies that he sent the shooters to murder her under cover of a massacre. After gunning down two terrorists herself and evacuating the hotel, Teagan is approached by CIA counterterrorism agent Robert Lexington, who drags her into an even murkier imbroglio. Lexington is secretly working for Italy’s Una Banca crime family, who want to kill Roman for betraying them; if Teagan assassinates Roman, he promises he’ll shield her from criminal charges for Project Rebound. This plot thickens further when Teagan gets unexpected news that changes her life. Soon, however, she sets off to hunt Roman down on the other side of the world.
This first installment of Ebner’s series suffers from an ungainly structure, with the narrative lurching from a storyline about improbably omnipotent terrorists to a different tale of implausibly omnipotent gangsters in its second half. Fortunately, much of the action is well staged and effective, especially Teagan’s stalking of Roman, which unfolds in unflashy scenes that highlight her doggedness before a blunt, brutal climax. Ebner gives his characters rich backstories and complex motivations that are reminiscent of a John le Carré novel, with Lexington intriguingly emerging as both victim and antagonist. Throughout, the author renders Teagan’s experiences in vivid prose that captures both the intimacy of motherhood (“After feeding her son, his little head would snuggle between her chin and shoulder…she could hear his every little breath and feel his tiny heart beating throughout his whole body”) and the jagged tensions of violence: “Teagan took a deep breath—ignoring the stabbing-like echo of the attacker’s assault rifle—stayed focused, exhaled and pulled the trigger.” In other passages, he evokes a George Smiley–esque mood of painful disillusionment: “ ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’ a supervisor had told him. But omelettes aren’t made from week old rotting bodies.” Overall, Teagan proves to be an appealing hero with depth and determination—readers will enjoy rooting for her. An entertaining page-turner that mixes punchy shootouts with resonant soul-searching.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780993061318
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Pen and Picture
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.
What happens when an eminent mystery novelist collaborates with an award-winning journalist on a spy thriller? Pretty much everything you can imagine.
While food blogger Alice Li is in retreat from her overbearing mother, famous Chinese dissident Vivien Li, in a restaurant bathroom, the alarm goes off. And not just the fire alarm, but every alarm in the city, the country, and around the world. Their triggering is clearly an act of terrorism, and the silencing of all those alarms, which comes as suddenly and inexplicably as their screeching, is anything but reassuring. Vivien spirits her daughter off to the White House, where Grant McAllister, the director of National Intelligence, informs Alice that her friend and fellow blogger Liam Palmer has just been fished from the Hong Kong harbor. McAllister and Alan Zhou, head of the China Mission Center, are convinced Liam knew something about those alarms, and President Fraser Pardington is determined to do whatever he can to prevent a sequel. He fails, of course, and the second act of global terrorism is even more disastrous than the first. All the president’s men and women initially believe the threat comes from the Chinese government, and Chinese President Chen Jiayang thinks the Americans might be behind it. Alice and Vivien race around the globe to track down the culprit, and what they find will knit together the fates of Alice’s family, the U.S. and China, and the history of the world as we know it.
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781250412522
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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