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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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