Despite the valedictory elements, Perry makes the distant past as vivid and immediate as the relentlessly paced present.
Nine years after his comeback appearance in The Informant (2011), the Butcher’s Boy returns yet again, and for the usual reason: Because somebody’s trying to kill him.
Michael Schaeffer, as he’s been calling himself now for many years, hardly breaks a sweat dispatching the four hit men who break into his aristocratic wife’s Yorkshire home. But an old pro like him realizes they’re only the tip of an iceberg, and when his flight to Australia merely makes him the target of a completely new crew of assassins, he realizes that the only way to end such a serpentine plot is to cut off its head. Breaking cover to drop in uninvited on Elizabeth Waring, the Justice Department Organized Crime official who still dreams of turning him into an informant, he learns one fact that could explain why he’s suddenly become a person of interest to both feds and organized crime once more: the impending parole hearing of Carlo Balacontano, a career criminal convicted in 1982 of the rare murder he didn’t commit. The Butcher Boy, hired by Bala for a routine hit and then placed in the crosshairs by his client because Bala didn’t care to pay him, killed Bala's frontman, Arthur Fieldston, and then took exceptional pains to frame Bala for the crime. Has his former client been waiting all these years for revenge? Or are the folks at Justice taking advantage of his possible parole to turn up the heat on Michael Schaeffer? Either way, many more brutally efficient executions are guaranteed. The biggest surprise here is the number of extended flashbacks to the Butcher Boy’s apprenticeship to (who else?) the Butcher.
Despite the valedictory elements, Perry makes the distant past as vivid and immediate as the relentlessly paced present.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5777-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
IN THE NEWS
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
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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