Proof that we don’t need the Cold War for smart spy fiction.
A retired CIA officer is pulled back into a dangerous game in this spy thriller by the author of Beirut Station (2023).
Alexander Matthews retired from the CIA and started Trinity Capital, a highly successful venture capital firm that often brings him to Russia. Once he’d been the CIA’s top spy in Moscow, but that’s all behind him now. But the Agency asks him for a favor: help extricate a Russian asset code-named Byron, a KGB-trained intelligence officer whom he had recruited and who claims to have sensitive secrets the CIA wants. He’d recruited other “poets” such as Keats and Blake, but they have vanished, perhaps in the bowels of Lefortvo Prison with bullets to the skull. Matthews has good reasons to decline: His late wife and daughter, killed in a boating accident while he was away, hated his lengthy absences, and he is on the verge of being estranged from his surviving son. He’s remarried to a CIA translator, and his travel stresses that marriage. So of course he goes to Moscow and is promptly arrested on a trumped-up solicitation charge. Then the FSB tells him he’s being investigated for tax fraud. Soon, he’s reminded that it’s dangerous for a wealthy American investor in Russia to be in the tabloids. And speaking of which, Byron claims to have the FSB’s kompromat on Topcat, who’d been in Moscow for the Miss Universe contest in 2013. One CIA official calls him Apocalypse 45, but like Voldemort, no one says his name. Readers will have to figure that out. Meanwhile, Langley believes it has a mole. Matthews feels an emotional tug to Russia’s capital city: He “wasn’t from Moscow, but he was of Moscow.” He’s going to have to get over that, as he’s not safe there anymore. Can he successfully exfiltrate Byron? As tension builds to a dramatic conclusion, so does the doubt. Vivid writing sets the tone: “The vans, yellow lights flashing, swallowed the prisoners like whales swallowing krill.” The plot delivers eye-opening twists as well as insights into the Russian psyche. “In Russia,” a character says, “stories never have happy endings.” This one fits right in.
Proof that we don’t need the Cold War for smart spy fiction.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368853
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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