This engaging, layered work proves to be both a love story and a cautionary tale.
An idealistic teacher gets sucked into an unfamiliar world of war profiteering in this bracing thriller.
Life changes for Roger Williams, a math teacher, when he meets and falls in love with Jill, an attractive woman who’s probably out of his league. They marry despite knowing little about each other. All Roger knows about Jill’s job is that she works for the shadowy Army contractor Grayrock. When Jill disappears, Roger suspects that she may have run off with her co-worker Lyle White. At the urging of friendly restaurateur Omar, Roger travels to Afghanistan looking for his wife. Once there, he eventually learns from Lyle that Jill is probably dead back in the States. He also discovers that he’s unknowingly part of a scheme to launder aid money stolen by Jill and Lyle. As Roger struggles to extricate himself from the con, he also tries to protect Sophie Martens, a Belgian aid worker. Had the money not been stolen, it was earmarked for Sophie’s group, which trains female teachers in Afghanistan. Despite being out of their depth, Roger and Sophie attempt to right a raft of wrongs in a country at war. In this battle between those trying to help (aid workers) and those trying to profit (exploitive contractors), author Keech, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Iran, makes no bones about which side he supports. Lyle is outright venal, with Jill only slightly more likable. Keech portrays Roger and Sophie as forces of good—moral but naïve—and their journey toward finding each other amid danger is memorable. However, the true scene-stealer here is the country of Afghanistan, brought to life in this well-researched volume (“Crawling through the traffic, they saw the turquoise blue dome of the mosque and its twin minarets against the mountains in the distance”). The chaos of war catalyzes key developments in the plot, and Afghanistan’s citizenry plays a strong supporting role.
This engaging, layered work proves to be both a love story and a cautionary tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8985667004
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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