A swing-for-the-fences novel, both a gripping procedural and high literary study of American bigotry.
A cop’s killing of an innocent teenager sparks an epic disquisition on race in the U.S.
Johnson’s hefty, free-wheeling, sharp-witted, disquieting third novel has a complexity that belies its straightforward premise. In Atlantis, Gorgeous (aka Atlanta, Georgia), in 2005, a veteran Black cop, George Washington Jonson, is partnered with a white rookie, Lukas Utner. While on patrol together, Lukas shoots and kills Anthony Montana, a white teen. The incident immediately draws media attention, as well as scrutiny from internal affairs. Did Lukas have cause to believe Anthony was armed? Was the gun found on the scene planted by another cop? George, who narrates the bulk of the novel, says in interspersed "confessions" set in the present day that the incident has inspired Hollywood adaptations. But those stories were designed to satisfy an audience hungry for easily digestible narratives around race, while George wants to immerse himself in the parts of the story that resist simple summary. Anthony was easy to write off for his involvement in the drug trade and in dogfighting, but he was in the process of extracting himself from both. George is a contemplative family man—he’s married to a white woman and has a healthy relationship with her son—but he’s also turned a blind eye to the systemic racism that’s infected the community, particularly its policing. (For Johnson, a key factor in the city’s dysfunction was the Kerner Commission, a group convened in 1967 by the Lyndon Johnson administration to investigate the root causes of race riots. Its report, George suggests, was co-opted as a playbook for segregationists.) George’s investigation prompts him to consider redlining, family services, predatory credit, policing, shoplifting, prisons, the decimation of Black neighborhoods in advance of the 1996 Olympics, and more. But for all of its hard look at history, the book is as witty as it is unflinching, rich in comic riffs about pop music, misunderstandings around race, and where society does and doesn’t place its empathy. A tidy resolution is absent, but it’s a rich portrait of the broken institutions that perpetuate racial injustice.
A swing-for-the-fences novel, both a gripping procedural and high literary study of American bigotry.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063330542
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.
A dark fantasy set on the Yale campus ends with a bang.
Galaxy “Alex” Stern of Lethe House, one of Yale’s storied secret societies, has been to hell and back. That was in Hell Bent (2023), the middle book in Bardugo’s Ninth House trilogy, where the secret societies wield not just temporal power but magic as well. Hell Bent ended with Alex and her friends rescuing her crush, mentor, and fellow Lethe officer, Daniel “Darlington” Arlington V, from eternal torment. One small wrinkle: The demon Golgarot used Alex’s blood to wedge a door open between Hell and New Haven, and his minions are slipping through. Also, one of the group has turned into a vampire, and Darlington is now half demon. “He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul. He’d become both prisoner and warden.” As the final book opens, the exhausted crew are hunting yet another monster. They can’t keep this up forever; they will have to find a way to close the portal. Alex has the energetic, driven melancholy of the hard-boiled, dark fantasy heroine she is. She believes “magic is real, but safe is make-believe,” as her roommate puts it. An open hellmouth, a supportive scholar, a vampire whose story arcs precariously toward redemption, a gentleman fiend who gets literally horny when aroused, a California girl with rare supernatural powers who cracks wise as she fights fiends—the series has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spawn, but Bardugo’s way with words and her keen social observation keep the book from feeling derivative. A demon’s classic New England house is decorated with “ruthlessly inoffensive watercolor seascapes”; Lethe’s board president “wore the new uniform of Wall Street: a dress shirt, khakis, and a fleece with a Yale Y embroidered over the heart, as if he were on his way to a hostile takeover followed by some light rock climbing.” Will Alex and her friends get the door shut without losing Darlington? Bardugo injects her protagonist with such a convincing mix of cynicism and hope that failure seems like a distinct possibility.
Sharp writing, vivid characters, and puzzle box plotting bring the trilogy to a ringing conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781250884312
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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