A bold, unsettling inquiry into guilt, judgment, and the impossible weight of spiritual responsibility.
A globe-spanning bioterror thriller that tests the limits of its heroine’s courage—and the powers of the seven souls that inhabit her.
In this sequel to 7th Soul (2023), when we again meet Ruggiero’s protagonist Coby Rodriguez, she’s juggling her life as a mother with her duties as intelligence operative. She’s then given an assignment that begins with “an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale.” The threat is a weaponized pathogen nicknamed Apocalypse, born in the icy reaches of the Merkit region and capable of killing in seconds. Early scenes in Siberia foreshadow its devastation: “They marched to the howling winds… [when] out of the distant sky, they heard a sound that was not normal—a clapping sound amplified by the mountains.” As these pathogen outbreaks strike unsuspecting cities, Coby is pulled deeper into a multinational hunt for Ogodal, a disgraced scientist turned extremist whose motive, the seven souls warn her, is simple: “Greed. The plan is to hold the world hostage for a monetary ransom.” Alongside her eclectic team—Mass, Elsa, Scott, Sergei, Izzy, and Eddy—she moves from intelligence headquarters to underground safehouses, from diplomatic corridors to remote mountain bases, with rapidly escalating stakes. Ruggiero injects the narrative with adrenaline-charged set pieces: covert break-ins; high-pressure interrogation scenes; and frantic tactical shifts as governments scramble. Yet the book’s most distinctive layer is the mystical one. The souls guiding Coby intervene at pivotal moments, sometimes with unnerving clarity: “Danger so great that we will not be able to save you… It will be soon.” The supporting cast adds texture and humor—(“I have the aorta of a pig” Elsa says after surgery) or the team’s running banter about assignments in warmer climates. Meanwhile, politics churn in the background. As the chase tightens and global pressure mounts, Coby’s supernatural abilities collide with her very human fear of failing her family—one of the novel’s strongest emotional currents. Ruggiero keeps the focus on urgency, action, and the uneasy blend of science and mysticism that defines his world.
A bold, unsettling inquiry into guilt, judgment, and the impossible weight of spiritual responsibility.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798891279209
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
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