An absorbing thriller that will keep readers guessing.
A bad morning turns fatal when a car crash kills a congressional candidate’s wife in Bridges’ thriller.
Daniel Morrison is a man at rock bottom dealing with a terrible job, divorce, and drug addiction. He’s late for work after another fight with his soon to be ex-wife Judy when he gets a call from his bully of a boss. The pressure is too much—he takes a pill while speeding down the road and crashes into a car driven by Claudia Grant. She is also speeding, talking on the phone with her lover; her marriage to congressional candidate Hayden Grant has hit a dead end. When the car crash results in her death, Hayden offers a million-dollar bounty to anyone who can find the responsible party. Daniel first makes his way to his sister Jessica and brother-in-law Ron’s house, where Ron hears of the bounty and tries to turn Daniel in. A violent and chaotic turn of events sends Daniel on the move again. Tracking him down is Detective Roya Navarro, who lives in the shadow of a scandal in which she agreed to a televised interview that ended in her slapping the reporter after he asked about her abusive ex. Now that same reporter, Gary Grey, is also on the case, dedicated to getting the story on Daniel before anyone else. Bridges uses brevity in his prose to emphasize the exhilarating events: “The passenger door is ripped open. Daniel holds onto the frame and his foot drags in the road. Panic sticks in his throat. He blurts out one word. ‘Drive.’” Bridge’s thriller is a fast-paced, action-packed story with a cast of memorable characters. Daniel is a complex protagonist, not entirely likable but always relatable. Detective Navarro drives the narrative forward with her intelligent decisions and grounded character. Both characters pick up an additional person who helps them along their journeys, adding parallel narratives to the cat-and-mouse chase. The ending surprises while tying up all the threads of the story in a satisfying manner.
An absorbing thriller that will keep readers guessing.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781509258444
Page Count: 262
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.
Second of the Walter Nash thrillers—following Nash Falls (2025)—in which the remade hero seeks vengeance.
Due to urgent circumstances, Nash has bulked himself up to become the “muscled and tatted fighting machine” now known as Dillon Hope. His antagonist is Victoria Steers, a global drug dealer who wants him dead. Not realizing his new identity, she enlists Hope to free her mother, Masuyo, from a prison in Myanmar. As an incentive, she shoots one of her associates and threatens to frame Hope for the murder unless he complies. She also wants him to find Nash. He in turn wants to kill Victoria to avenge the death of his innocent daughter, Maggie. “If I go down,” he muses, “I’m taking others with me. Starting with Victoria Steers.” He learns that Victoria had killed all her siblings to eliminate business competition. But as heartless as Victoria is, her mother, Masuyo, is even worse. In league with the Chinese government in a perverse plan to kill as many Americans as possible through fentanyl overdose, she shows contempt for Victoria for her perceived weaknesses. Readers won’t find many happy family relationships here: mother-daughter, father-son, husband-wife—all fraught. Hope’s employer, who accompanies him to Myanmar, is a billionaire chief executive with a dodgy past (i.e., probably killed his father). And there’s a mega-billionaire with an astronomical IQ and ditch-deep morals who, putting it mildly, does not have America’s best interests at heart. As a teenager, he’d defeated two world chess champions; as an adult, he regards his dealings with the world in terms of master chess moves. Only one character seems truly decent and credible—Hiroko, Victoria’s former nanny and lifelong companion, who provides Hope with valuable insights into the Steers’ background, which is partly Chinese. Searing grudges, simple evil, and not-so-simple misunderstandings carry the cast through this complex, action-packed plot. This sequel ties out the loose ends dangling in Nash Falls, which would be helpful to read first. To get to the requisite ending, though, Baldacci takes pains to surprise the reader. It works but often feels forced.
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781538758021
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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