Underneath all the chaotic plotting and crossplotting, McGarrity’s New Mexico seethes with life.
Retired Santa Fe police chief Kevin Kerney gets only a minor role in his 14th appearance. Considering what the leading characters are up to, that’s a lucky break for him.
It all begins at a motel where James Goggin and Lucy Nautzile have been scalped after their throats were surgically cut, presumably by Estavio Trevino, a professional assassin who prefers to be called El Jefe. As if the carnage isn’t disturbing enough, John Cosgrove, the night clerk who reports discovering the bodies to Kerney’s son, Deputy Clayton Istee, of the Doña Ana County Sheriff’s Office, vanishes and promptly turns up with his own throat cut. It’s the beginning of a pattern that plays out all over the tribal lands of New Mexico and environs: First characters are introduced by name, placed in a thickly imagined web of relatives, and given a backstory, then they’re violently dispatched. Ever since stealing $200,000 from a tribal casino, the first two victims had been on the run—not from the law, to whom the theft was never reported, but from a mélange of gangsters, hirelings, informants, and paid killers who now all come rushing into Clayton’s ken. Soon after agreeing to join undercover DEA agent Bernard Harjo in a journey to El Jefe, an encounter the all-knowing killer plans to end by ransoming his visitors, Clayton shoots El Jefe’s adopted son, Fernando Olguin, in self-defense, putting himself squarely in the assassin’s crosshairs, where he’s got plenty of company. Gang leaders fight rival gang leaders, dirty cops go up against even dirtier cops, and it all ends with the 70th birthday party of Kevin Kerney. Remember him?
Underneath all the chaotic plotting and crossplotting, McGarrity’s New Mexico seethes with life.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00285-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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