Spy fiction at its headiest and most addictive.
Despite embarrassing the CIA by exposing a high-ranking agent’s efforts to rig the 1996 Russian elections and murder people to keep the operation a secret, field agent Ari Falk is drafted for a sensitive undercover job in this standalone sequel to The Collaborators (2024).
Why would his boss, Asha Tamaskar, the CIA’s edgy new deputy director of covert operations, turn to him to infiltrate a radical European group bent on doing grave damage to Western interests? Who better to play double agent than an operative the Company “burn[ed]…before the entire world” and for whose actions the U.S. had planned to apologize to Russia before that country’s invasion of Ukraine “rendered this and every other issue moot.” Since being outed for having passed the incriminating dossier to a WikiLeaks-type publisher—an action for which some people consider him a hero—Falk has been hiding out in the Republic of Georgia. Now back on the beat, learning how to be a double agent as he goes, he pursues the intel needed to thwart the radical group’s coldly self-regarding front man, Felix Burnham, a onetime CIA agent and American citizen born in Russia. Falk’s increasingly dangerous mission takes him across Europe, out in the open, from Tbilisi to Prague to London, through checkpoints and in the crosshairs of an elusive enforcer known as Cormorant. A ghostlike presence, Cormorant has been killing people for decades. His most recent victim: the publisher of the dossier. While James Bond, Jack Ryan, and Jason Bourne are invoked here and there’s plenty of action and intrigue, the true nature of espionage is revealed as far less glamorous: “Spycraft was a field of empty traps, rusting open.” Idov offers real insight into the self-protective games his characters play. The cagey CIA asset Katya Lisichenko “carried herself like a bearer of secrets, careful not to trip and spill. Tamaskar had seen this type of apprehension in assets before. It usually meant the real deal. It was always the ones with nothing to tell who wouldn’t stop talking.”
Spy fiction at its headiest and most addictive.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781668082287
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.
An author is targeted by a fan who just can’t let her go.
Arden Bowie has had plenty of tragedy in her life, but now she’s finally on top. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she moved from Brooklyn to Ohio to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. She soon became part of their loving family and grew up to become a writer and bookseller. When her debut novel is published, she meets Dustin Dubecki at her first event. He showers her with praise, asks for writing advice, and wants to take her out for coffee. Arden tells herself he’s just a little awkward, but then he keeps showing up at her local events—and, even stranger, she’s sure she sees him lurking at her event in New York City. When he bursts into her apartment one night and assaults her, Arden’s calm life is shattered. Dustin gets a five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility; Arden spends most of that time rebuilding her sense of stability. Eventually, she moves to Oregon to start a new life where Dustin can never find her. But even though she has a beautiful home, a thriving career, a doting family, new friends, and even a potential love interest in a former cop named Gideon Riley, Arden can’t escape Dustin’s rage when his sentence is finally up. Roberts toggles between Arden’s point of view and Dustin’s, giving the reader occasional glimpses into his extremely twisted mindset. Although Arden’s attempts to escape Dustin are engrossing, the story stalls in the middle when far too many pages are dedicated to Arden purchasing and decorating a house. But the excitement picks back up when Dustin, a truly odious villain, re-enters the story. It’s also satisfying to see Arden grow into someone who refuses to be a victim, even as she deals with horrifying circumstances.
A particularly nasty villain heightens the stakes in this thriller about a woman learning how to be her own hero.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250413581
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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