Readers mourning the death of Thomas Perry are advised to try Lawson’s equally deadpan political thrillers, beginning here.
Influential Congressman John Mahoney gets a rare chance to neutralize a long-standing enemy that sounds too good to be true—because it is.
Acting on information he’s received from Diane Lake, of Vicount Analytics, Mahoney wants longtime fixer Joe DeMarco to determine whether Lydia Chang, the much younger wife of Sen. Douglas “Dutch” McMillian, has really been meeting with Zhou Enlai, an intelligence officer at D.C.’s Chinese embassy, whom Diane claims has pressed Lydia to become an agent for the Chinese government. Diane doesn’t want the publicity that would come from outing Lydia, and since Dutch routinely spars with Mahoney on every imaginable front, she figures it’s a great opportunity for him. As DeMarco quickly discovers, however, the situation is more complicated than that. Lydia has indeed been meeting Zhou, and she and her daughter, Jenny, are both walking on thin ice, subject to all kinds of pressure about a potentially compromising secret they’re keeping. But DeMarco’s friend Mike McGuire, a former CIA agent, doesn’t think the plot smells like a Chinese operation at all. He thinks it’s being engineered by the Russians or the CIA itself. As it turns out, he’s right about the first part but wrong about the second. As usual, Lawson keeps the story moving as fast as a runaway rocket, seamlessly changing gears from “What’s going on?” to “What can we do about it?” to “How can we keep it quiet?” to “How will our attempts compare to our enemy’s?” while implicating more bad actors at every turn.
Readers mourning the death of Thomas Perry are advised to try Lawson’s equally deadpan political thrillers, beginning here.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780802167002
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Crime
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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