An up-to-the-minute thriller that ably tackles contemporary politics.
An investigator takes on a group of right-wing grifters and domestic terrorists in Moore’s political thriller.
Private eye Nick Crane is spending time in a Pacific Northwest cabin one evening when a mysterious man named Mars throws a brick through his window. Mars informs Crane that he’ll be driven to Vail, Colorado, to meet Willem Spahn, a financier with a relationship to a high-profile group of hard-right reactionaries. Crane has dealt with associates of the group, including Desmond Cole and Marguerite Ferguson, before—he knows they shoot to kill. Marguerite’s latest scheme is to back legislation that calls for the imprisonment of undocumented Latine people and Muslims, plus a plan to build for-profit private jails. Crane soon arrives in Vail, where Spahn explains that Cole is trying to save him from Ferguson, who wants to kill him. Crane is suspicious of his Spahn’s motives, but he’s soon crisscrossing the country trying to figure out what Marguerite is up to; in Wisconsin, she’s planning alt-right Make America Safe Again rallies. In the meantime, Nick’s business partner Bobby is taken hostage, drugged, and made to speak at a rally. With the help of FBI agent Carrie North, Nick puts himself in serious danger to save his friend and partner’s life. Moore’s fast-paced, exciting political thriller is full of action and intrigue. However, it’s also rather crowded, with a few too many extraneous characters. That said, it offers deliciously wicked villains—particularly the sly Ferguson—who are shown to be tough as nails (“I knew they didn’t want to kill me. Orders were to take me alive. So that Marguerite could deliver the coup de grâce personally”). Crane, meanwhile, always has right on his side. The timely plot will resonate with many readers as it digs deep into a depraved, shadowy underworld of manipulation and greed.
An up-to-the-minute thriller that ably tackles contemporary politics.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781643962986
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
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