An immersive mystery caper with a memorably disturbed protagonist at its center.
A career’s worth of contradictions come home to roost for Thomas’ neurotic detective in this novel, the final volume of a crime trilogy.
Raymond Mackey, a wrongfully disgraced Chicago cop turned investigator for Internal Affairs, is having a rough time. His side hustle as an aspiring crime novelist isn’t going well. He’s concerned his drinking has become a problem. He can’t quit his pack-a-day smoking habit, even after his doctors discover a shadow on his lung. His depersonalization-derealization disorder—a dissociative condition that causes him to view himself from above his own body and critique his every behavior—has gotten worse. (He calls it his “triple D.”) He suspects he’s being followed by somebody, but he isn’t sure who; Mack is a man with many enemies, including judges, reporters, his former partners on the force, and a pseudonymous Chicago crime boss known only as Big Man. Worst of all is the discovery that Mack’s dead wife, Marlo Kline, the woman he loved more than anything and whose death he has never gotten over, may not have been faithful to him. At least, that’s what’s implied by an old photograph supplied to Mack by the mysterious Frenchie Marie, an unassuming woman whose motivations Mack cannot discern. Frenchie wants Mack to investigate his own lieutenant at Internal Affairs to uncover the man’s connection to a recent double homicide—indeed, to become the very sort of informant Mack has always denied being. In exchange, Frenchie will help him figure out the meaning of the old photograph that shows Marlo hand in hand with one of the city’s greatest crooks, seated at the same table as mob fixers and a future mayor of Chicago. There’s a conspiracy afoot in the Windy City, the biggest Mack has ever encountered, but it’s unclear whether he’s meant to unravel it or if he himself is at its center. As Mack quips, “I’m realizing that paranoia means never making a final decision about these kinds of things.”
Thanks to Mack’s “triple D,” his narration is occasionally interrupted at critical moments by the intrusions of his disembodied psyche. “He wants me to tell him what I see,” the psyche says of Mack after a man leaps out of his closet, knocks him to the ground, and sticks a bag over his head. “He wants to know who’s in the room with him. Wish I could help. Triple D doesn’t work that way. I show him what it looks like to be him.” For all the postmodern flourishes, Thomas excels at delivering insightful, almost epigrammatic observations, like this one from Mack about how tensions arise at Internal Affairs: “That’s the problem with the modern workplace. Trying not to stand too close to one guy means standing too close to someone else. A planet this populated makes watching your own back almost impossible.” Some readers may balk at the nearly 650-page length, but Thomas keeps the narrative compelling as Mack races doggedly toward his hardboiled destiny.
An immersive mystery caper with a memorably disturbed protagonist at its center.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798987167779
Page Count: 689
Publisher: OTF Literary
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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