There’s a dumpster’s worth of action and attitude here.
Trouble finds retired sniper Bob Lee Swagger in this rip-roaring, blood-spilling, right-wing rant.
The opening feels like a zombie novel, portraying northern New Jersey as a “slough of despond” with “three-foot-long bull crickets,” the fragrance of “large, dead Italians,” and a landscape with “a wondrous satanic cast.” (Ha ha. Take that, Garden State!) Bad guys hijack a truck and leave corpses behind, but they fail to kill the warrior elite hero named Delta. Meanwhile in Idaho, the septuagenarian Bob Lee Swagger mends in peace from a near-fatal wound until bad news arrives: Congress will hold a hearing in Boise into whether retired Marine Corps Gunnery Sgt. Swagger had used unauthorized ammo in taking out Juba the Sniper. “Policemen must be prepared to retreat rather than return fire,” one pol pontificates. Apparently, some candy-ass congressmen hate guns and killing and stuff, and they want to find a way to bring down Swagger, the great American hero. “Even heroes have to be held accountable for their decisions,” a senator says. The cartoonish Congresswoman Charlotte Venable hates Swagger, the president’s favorite sniper. The author takes plenty of cheap, lib-owning political shots, as when Delta likens his situation to bathing in pain, breathing sulfur fumes, and listening to the wisdom of Stephen Colbert in stereo. A New York Times reporter has a mouth that looks like a vagina and is “your basic child-molester type of anonymous wretch.” The poor guy’s hair “fell like shit from a flock of diarrhetic geese.” Another reporter is a “CNN haircut eunuch.” The aforementioned crims storm the hearing, planning to take eight congressmen hostage. (It must take place in Idaho because who would ever attack the U.S. Capitol?) Bloody mayhem ensues, with an ingenious sequence involving a wheelchair that does Swagger proud. A neat subplot reaches back to the American Revolution and asks whether he is destined by his DNA to be a natural-born killer. Politics aside, were that possible, Swagger’s adventures are escapist fun. Just watch out when the geezer turns 80!
There’s a dumpster’s worth of action and attitude here.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-9821-6979-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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