A noirish thriller that starts strong but fizzles fast.
Baker’s thriller follows a man caught up in an international scheme involving wine gone very bad.
In Carmel, California, a man stands in front of the wreck of a car. He has no idea who he is, how he got there, or what has happened, but a woman named Laura informs him that he is called Antonio Sloveno. She takes him to a palatial house where a man claiming to be his business partner (and doctor) tells him they have shared “special interests” and that there is work to be done. Before he knows it, “Tony” finds himself going along with some sort of criminal scheme that he seems to be at the center of, holding a loaded gun. (“Have I used one of these things before?” he wonders.) Unfortunately for “Tony,” the dangers are only just beginning. After someone tries to kill him, and he sees himself in the paper listed as a dangerous criminal wanted in both the U.S. and Europe, he sets off on his own. “Tony” quickly realizes that his name is actually Steve, and that Laura is using him as a patsy to help the real Antoino Sloveno pull off a murderous plot involving French wines. As his memories and pieces of the puzzle start to come together, Steve sets off to France to foil Sloveno’s plans, but a sharp inspector from Paris is hot on his trail and desperate to put him behind bars. Baker’s initial amnesia setup is great pulpy fun; he excels at putting readers into Steve/Tony’s hair-raising situation. Unfortunately, Steve’s memory comes back far too quickly, and the novel becomes a much more predictable amateur detective story. The action sequences fail to deliver enough suspense to keep things engaging; “Tony lay motionless for a moment, stunned he’d been within a heartbeat of his own sudden death,” Baker writes, describing a struggle that should be heart-pounding but lacks urgency. The plot leads to some fabulous locations and offers an intriguing look at the global wine trade, but all the answers arrive too fast—this mystery needs much more time to breathe.
A noirish thriller that starts strong but fizzles fast.Pub Date: June 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781038326836
Page Count: 258
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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