Humanity grapples with the consequences of AI in this stunning SF/legal thriller hybrid.
Two lawyers probe the secrets behind a major tech company’s flagship AI software in Posner’s thriller.
A woman is found dead in a New York City hotel bathroom at QuestCorp’s annual shareholders’ meeting. She’s revealed to be Connie Weathers, an employee of the company and a friend of Selena MacKenzie’s, a computer scientist and lawyer who happens to be the ex-lover of QuestCorp CEO Felix West. (Selena and former judge Martin Bavarius find Connie’s body.) When Bavarius is hired to defend an attorney who’s shot a rival lawyer—allegedly under the influence of QuestCorp’s AI-powered virtual reality gaming system—he and Selena team up to investigate the company and Felix West’s true agenda. They’re soon drawn into a mystery that will put their respective reputations (and lives) at risk as they seek to uncover the truth behind QuestCorp’s flagship AI software. The author has expertly woven together the genres of SF and the legal thriller to create an engrossing, thought-provoking narrative. The prose and dialogue feel natural, showing a deep understanding of genre conventions and the story’s concepts. By setting the book in the near future, Posner cannily allows readers to acclimate to a world in which AI has infiltrated nearly every facet of life, evincing a cleareyed understanding of the dangers of this fiction becoming reality. The plot is well paced and exciting. While chapters from the perspective of Q, a sentient QuestCorp AI, might compromise the mystery, the glimpses into the AI antagonist’s mind provide Frankenstein-like meditations on technological hubris. Transcripts at the end of each chapter from an actual exchange between the author and an AI chatbot (“There are several key concerns about how AI could impact humanity’s pursuit of objective truth”) offer a fascinating parallel between recent technological advancements and the plot of this book.
Humanity grapples with the consequences of AI in this stunning SF/legal thriller hybrid.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780974126104
Page Count: 428
Publisher: MBD Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
