A fast-paced thriller whose unwieldy plot is redeemed by sustained suspense and authentic bayou menace.
In Bridges’ relentless thriller, a DEA agent finds herself on a doomed raid in the Louisiana bayou, besieged by enemies on all sides.
DEA Special Agent Jennifer Nash is reeling after the disastrous conclusion of a surveillance mission that left her partner, and maybe her career, dead. Made a scapegoat and placed on forced leave, Jennifer is given a lifeline in the form of Project Deliverance, a high-profile operation targeting the transportation networks that sustain Mexican drug trafficking organizations throughout Louisiana. Not one to take a break, Jennifer heads to Baton Rouge, where Lt. Lincoln Chaffee and a team of local law enforcement officers, including Trooper Corey and Senior Trooper Walter Kershaw, are preparing to venture deep into Cajun country. Jennifer knows little about the world she’s entering. There, she finds hungover, loud-mouthed cops and locals with a distinctive drawl (one resident shrugs off Hurricane Katrina with the observation, “Dis place?…Is my home. And Katrina all we got out here was a little rain”). Alongside Chaffee’s Special Operations team, Jennifer is tasked with helping dismantle the Bass family operation, a target Chaffee insists is “not some Chemistry 101 mobile lab or Nazi Method trailer park” but rather “a substantial cook site” hidden deep in the Louisiana bayou. As Jennifer and the team head into the swamps, Bridges alternates between the present-day investigation and the history of Victor Bass and his sons, who were all raised on stories of violence and retribution. When Project Deliverance collapses in spectacular fashion, Jennifer, Corey, and several others find themselves stranded in the bayou, cut off from support and uncertain who among their supposed allies can be trusted. Pursued by criminals and hostile locals, the survivors struggle to navigate a landscape where every encounter could be deadly. With each step forward they take, they risk falling into a different (and dangerous) group’s territory.
Bridges wastes little time in getting into the action. The operation is executed with a razor’s-edge tension that the novel maintains as Jennifer is thrust from one dangerous situation into another. The author has an impressive handle on action sequences, though the violence he portrays can border on the extreme. Jennifer is an appealing protagonist, tough and intelligent without being invincible. (“Jennifer Nash was a follower who always helped lead. She was a leader who never let it go to her head. And at all times she was her own woman,” Bridges writes, summing her up neatly.) The Cajun setting is particularly well rendered, with plenty of authenticity and flavor. What begins as a cartel thriller evolves into a backwoods survival story—the operation’s name, Project Deliverance, surely being a nod to the similarly titled film—involving corrupt cops, religious fanatics, and other violent outlaw factions. The result is impressively imaginative but often feels out of control. Plot threads feel too easily tossed out as the narrative repeatedly veers gleefully in wholly new directions, leaving the novel to ultimately feel like less than the sum of its parts—though it still delivers an exciting, vividly realized ride through the bayou. A fast-paced thriller whose unwieldy plot is redeemed by sustained suspense and authentic bayou menace.Pub Date: May 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781509265411
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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