Plenty of intrigue and action for crime fans.
A paper mill in Georgia uses murder to buoy its bottom line.
Killers hunt down and kill a retiree while he’s peacefully fishing. No one suspects foul play, as the poor man apparently hit his head on a low branch and drowned. Attorney Brent Walker is hired to be assistant general counsel for the Southern Republic Pulp and Paper Company, where his longtime friend Hank Reed is a union official. They are not privy to the company’s biggest secret, and this story is about what they learn and what they do about it. A small cabal at the top of the company has a creative approach to cost-saving: They’ve created something called the Priority program, which identifies and eliminates expensive employees and retirees. Critically for the plot, the company is self-insured. So how can it stay profitable if it must pay out big claims for, say, cancer or Alzheimer’s patients? Maybe an employee stays healthy but has a child with a lifelong debilitating illness. The solution for this company lies in the untimely deaths of these troublesome claimants. “Terminal care was particularly expensive. An almost bottomless pit.” Top management has a long-standing arrangement with a group of professionals who expertly make deaths look natural. There is a mysterious list of nine-digit numbers, unaccompanied by any explanation. The obvious guess is that they are Social Security numbers, which may or may not be what they are. Walker and Reed intend to learn their significance, and their sleuthing could end up with—well, people dying. In fact, the killings become much less subtle as the action reaches a crescendo. Meanwhile, the bad guys are acutely aware of their culpability—if anyone finds a certain set of secret folders, there may be “enough evidence to indict us all for mass murder.” One of their hired killers is dying from cancer and wishes to partially repent, though he knows “his soul was beyond saving, his eternal fate sealed.” But maybe he can keep Priorities off future lists. The author is an attorney familiar with Georgia’s paper industry, so he’s clearly well suited to the topic, and readers will recognize the similarities to John Grisham.
Plenty of intrigue and action for crime fans.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770870
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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