A wonderfully written thriller with Big Sky country as a setting.
Montana Voice podcast host Saroff debuts with a novel about an enigmatic loner who attracts strange characters as he tries to do good—or repair the bad he has done.
Enzi is much like Saroff: a runaway and a dyslexic who started with nothing. But he discovers a talent for—and a fascination with—math and winds up a successful computer coder with his own company. But he has come under the sway of Tommy Tsai, a very smooth and very, very bad guy, and gets drawn into cybercrime. At the same time, he posts bail for, and falls half in love with, a young woman named Kaori, an unbalanced Japanese artist prone to not just violent mood swings, but violence itself. Halfway through the novel, the Kaori story takes a back seat to Enzi’s desperate fight to break Tsai’s hold over him. It’s unwise to try to walk away from Tommy Tsai, who has murderous contacts, and true to thriller conventions, the plot involves a race against time. The story is set in Montana (mostly Missoula), and Enzi can wax eloquent about the surrounding mountains and streams. That’s one way his tale has something of the spirit of Hemingway stories like “Up in Michigan.” Another is that his spare—for the most part—prose seems designed to step out of the way but is arresting in itself. But Saroff is also capable of lyric flights and striking metaphors, referring in one passage to “the self-created legal clockwork of his [father’s] ruin.” One of Enzi’s allies is a bail bondsman named Pascal Ameto, a source of practical wisdom who is very like Enzi in his manner and a true friend in a strange way, who addresses Enzi simply as “a Fella” (“A Fella should probably have a drink with me later”). And Pascal has his own interesting stories to tell. It’s no spoiler to say that by the end, Enzi is on his own in the desert, starting over or that that’s the story of his life.
A wonderfully written thriller with Big Sky country as a setting.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985703832
Page Count: 205
Publisher: Flooding Island
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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