A compelling thriller that combines a healthy mix of real-world action and nefarious online activities.
Bach explores politics and technology in this international thriller.
The year is 2023; Phoenix Humboldt is attending Aragon High School in a suburb of San Francisco. When shots are fired from the school roof, Phoenix springs into action and attempts to protect other students with her body, getting hit in the process. It turns out the shooting was the work of a professional, who used “high-end military-grade equipment.” The shooter also managed to escape the scene without any problem. But why was Phoenix the only one who was shot? Phoenix’s father, Johnny Humboldt, is a divorced man who happens to be dating a U.S. senator and decorated Air Force veteran named Tamika Smith. Tamika received some perplexing emails on the morning of the shooting—threats from Air Force Capt. Derrick Tomlinson. This would be troubling enough, as Tomlinson sexually assaulted Tamika while they were in the military together, but Tomlinson is also supposed to be dead. Soon enough, Johnny is kidnapped. It becomes clear that a wealthy man named Lee Bowen is behind these events, but what exactly does he want? When Bowen anticipates that the “chaos he was creating would be epic,” the narrative does not disappoint. Bach’s eventful yarn takes readers from an “an autonomous firing nest” in an arboretum to trouble in the Netherlands to technological machinations that send the narrative “into cryptoland and across the dark web”; the school shooting is merely the beginning. While the reader is kept engaged and eager to see where all of this will lead, following the characters through their investigations is not always thrilling. Readers know who the bad guys are—it takes quite some time for the characters to catch up. Nevertheless, there is great excitement to be had in finding out if the malefactors can be stopped.
A compelling thriller that combines a healthy mix of real-world action and nefarious online activities.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798886454000
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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