Dramatic history presented in vivid detail.
A World War II Navy captain looks for signs of a Japanese atomic bomb program.
In March 1945, Germany has given up, but the war in the Pacific is far from over. Captain Wolfe Bowen is ordered to check out a surrendered German U-boat that had two Japanese passengers aboard and find out what they’d been doing in the North Atlantic. The sub is a strange one, having a second deck but no torpedo tubes. In that extra deck is uranium that the German captain will not show Bowen even at gunpoint. Strahlung, the German explains. Radiation. Bowen reports this to his superiors, who clue him in about our Manhattan Project, which is so secret that FDR (who dies within weeks) even keeps it from Vice President Truman. Bowen also learns that the Nazis had been trying to develop an atomic bomb, so is Germany sharing its technology with Japan? That is for Bowen to find out as he travels by submarine through dangerous Japanese waters. Indeed, as U.S. brass had never expected, he witnesses spectacular evidence of the enemy’s nuclear efforts. This news must immediately get to the suddenly President Truman. What if an atomic bomb explodes on our invading troops? In this fictional telling, such a prospect drives Truman to drop U.S. bombs first. Bowen works closely with Lieutenant Commander Janet Waring, who knows Japanese culture and language. They get along quite well—he’s a big fellow who pumps iron to relieve his stress, then learns that she is happy to relieve his stress in bed. After the bombs, President Truman directs the duo to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and report back to him how bad it really was. And how did ordinary people feel about the American victors—was it rage or resignation? What “the Japanese were calling the second sun had bloomed in the early morning sky over Hiroshima” and left human shadows burned into sidewalks. Survivors looked like the living dead. All colors disappeared, leaving only black and white. Bowen and Waring are exceptionally good at finding out what the big shots need to know, and readers will like them both. Whether Japan ever had its own atomic bomb program is unknown, though the author thinks they probably did.
Dramatic history presented in vivid detail.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781250360977
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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