The perfect in-flight read, starring a surprisingly resourceful antihero who spends much of his own time in flight.
An inoffensive printer’s troubles only begin when he’s targeted for death.
Roger Smith works for the Government Publishing Office in Washington, D.C. He has a side gig designing greeting cards. He’s a longtime widower a year from retirement whose work has always been exemplary. So why does an assassin break into his house in the middle of the night and pepper his bed with bullets? It’s too late to ask Anton LeBlanc, the hit man, since Roger managed to kill him. But Det. Grace Lillinthal, of the D.C. Metro Police, would sure like to know, and the suspicious behavior of Roger, who’s very much an amateur at this, convinces her that the killer’s motive has something to do with Roger’s connection to his neighbor John McKenna, an ex-con bar owner with many criminal connections of his own. She’s right, of course: Roger’s been crafting false passports for select McKenna clients for years. Roger has his standards. His set price of $50,000 discourages minor leaguers. He won’t make more than one phony passport a year. And he won’t help supply murderers or others who pose a danger to society. So his target clientele, scammers who’ve defrauded the wealthy, are pretty rich themselves, and one of them clearly sent LeBlanc after him. But how did the client get Roger’s name, what does he have against him, and what are the chances that the next killer he hires, or the one after that, will get to Roger before Lillinthal cracks him open? Forgoing the occasional humor of Congressional fixer Joe DeMarco’s adventures, Lawson’s stand-alone strips plot, characters, and prose down to exceptional efficiency, producing maximum thrills without a wasted word.
The perfect in-flight read, starring a surprisingly resourceful antihero who spends much of his own time in flight.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9798228358188
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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