This is what you’d get if a Dan Brown novel was rewritten by Emily Henry.
A puzzle-hungry academic and an ass-kicking cryptologist vie for $12 million—and each other’s hearts.
Zoe Wilder is excited to present a paper at her first academic conference in Madrid, and almost as happy to break up with her professor boyfriend once they arrive in Spain. She’s also come secretly hoping to join the Enigma Challenge, a legendary puzzle contest that attracts some of the best minds in the world—though it’s supposedly run by a shady tech corporation, and most of the people chasing down the clues seem to be thugs and criminals. When a Reddit thread leads Zoe to the first puzzle, an easy solve (for her), she kick-starts a series of events that will take her—and a handsome, mysterious stranger named Dane Seaver—all over Europe to solve the five ciphers. The puzzles themselves take up little space in the book other than as plot devices, so readers hoping to challenge themselves might be disappointed. Instead, the novel follows the fairly conventional structure of an action romance: meet cute; flee for your life; stay ahead of the people chasing you; double cross (or is it?); denouement. The characters, too, tend to follow type: the villains are super villainous, the best friends are loyal, Zoe is smart and spunky, and Dane is a six-pack of abs with a vulnerable heart. Zoe and Dane accomplish a fair amount of travel around Europe in a short amount of time, helped by the fact that he is a millionaire several times over, and fight not only the other puzzlers but also their growing attraction to one another. There are some pretty heavy action scenes, and some pretty heavy love scenes, and all of it culminates in a cliffhanger that suggests our puzzle-kicking lovebirds are just getting started.
This is what you’d get if a Dan Brown novel was rewritten by Emily Henry.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9798217059676
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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 tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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