This novel’s fast pace can’t save it from its collection of caricatures.
In Shemella’s thriller, Manuel Noriega plots a vengeful plan to destroy the Panama Canal.
Manuel Noriega, the infamous dictator of Panama deposed by an American invasion, languishes in a federal penitentiary in Florida, but he still has access to great reserves of wealth. He sends a secret message, reluctantly conveyed by Oscar Castillo, a priest, to Jorge Mena Velasquez, “the most ruthless and powerful drug lord in Latin America,” with a peculiar proposition. In exchange for destroying the Panama Canal, Noriega will give him $100 million—half upfront and the other half on completion of the revenge mission. Meanwhile, canal pilot Manfredo Alegre Rivas is suddenly kidnapped, the victim of an obviously professional operation. Lt. Cmdr. Carl Malinowski, a Navy SEAL, is tasked with investigating the peculiar crime—he assembles a team that includes three other SEALs along with his paramour and “secret weapon,” Ana Maria Castaneda, a former intelligence officer. When Castillo is murdered, Carl believes that there is a connection between his death and the kidnapping of the pilot, which now seems like a small cog of a much vaster conspiratorial machine. Typical of the prose here, the clichéd point is made melodramatically: “The kidnapping was just the opening act!” The central premise of the plot is inventively cinematic—one can imagine it transformed for the big screen, especially given the brisk pace of the story, constant action, and realistic details. Shopworn formulas and leaden contrivances, however, undo the novel. Carl lacks nuance; when not brilliantly saving the day, he offers banalities like these: “Sooner or later, justice comes for everyone who plays by the rules of the jungle. Morality is all that stands between us and the animals.”
This novel’s fast pace can’t save it from its collection of caricatures.Pub Date: June 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66244-026-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Fun for fans of fictional mayhem.
Revenge is the order of the day in this action-packed Gray Man thriller.
That freelance assassin Court Gentry has enemies shocks no one. Code-named Violator in his CIA days, he has since become the Gray Man, so elusive that some think him a myth. He’s not complicated: “If I’ve got pants on, I’ve got a gun on,” he describes himself succinctly. In this episode, everybody wants something. James Westwood wants to be senator and eventually president, and isn’t above committing treason to get there. Two fearsome killers, each with his own agenda, want Gentry dead. Gentry himself wants to get to Russia for contract work, but first he must get out of Bulgaria, where he kills Northern Irish criminal Charlie Coyle in a gunfight. Hyperline Level IIIA body armor saves Gentry’s life in that encounter, but now he must face Charlie’s dad, Campbell Coyle, whose “one singular objective in life” is to come to America and cut a bloody swath to exact deadly revenge on “the man who had murdered his son.” The elder Coyle is a “bad man with a dark history, and he came from a long line of men with dark histories.” Yet he understands how much he and the Gray Man have in common, that they are both “God’s living proof” that humans have not progressed in 800 years. There’s also Lancer, a dangerous former Navy SEAL turned assassin who says that “Court Gentry is the man who put me in prison in Cuba, and he’s gonna pay.” Meanwhile, series regular Zack Hightower spies on his biological daughter. He means no harm but simply wants to know that she’s well, but what follows is one damn thing after another. At first it looks like a separate plot line, but everything comes back to the Gray Man. The story is nearly 500 pages of gunfire, explosions, a spring-loaded wrist stiletto, treason, vengeance, blood, bodies, and a teenage girl who loves her adoptive father and doesn’t know bio dad even exists.
Fun for fans of fictional mayhem.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593954812
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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