A riveting spy tale that delivers a CIA hero fighting Islamic terrorists.
A debut thriller features a CIA officer who must stop a terrorist attack.
In Paris, a van carrying two “briefcase-size parcels” to the U.S. Embassy is ambushed, sparking an international crisis. The driver of the van is beheaded in the assault, suggesting merciless terrorists are involved. Enter American Tom Rivers, a CIA officer who formerly worked in Army intelligence. With his Luminox watch and ability to take a beating in the line of duty, he’s tasked with figuring out what’s going on. He meets a “smart, beautiful and dangerous” woman named Raz Jackson in Paris. Raz is a former CIA agent who uses her old connections to provide upscale hotels and businesses with security systems. Raz and Rivers hit it off, but there’s still plenty of perilous work to be done. It soon becomes apparent that terrorists are planning an attack in the United States. A key conspirator is an American-born woman and former FBI/CIA asset called Susan Owens, who took classes in Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky and now goes by the name Umm al-Nasr. In college, she befriended many people from the Middle East and wound up keeping an eye on them for the FBI. But she became radicalized while spending time in Damascus. She eventually married a top-ranking Islamic State terrorist known as Omar the Chechen, who was subsequently killed in a 2017 airstrike. Umm now has vengeance on her mind. She has no qualms about training girls to become suicide bombers and working with an unsavory Chechen named Dogu Matsoy, who aims to be the next Osama bin Laden. It will take concerted efforts by people like Rivers and Raz to prevent extensive bloodshed.
Naturally, Rivers encounters trouble wherever he goes in McQuay’s energetic tale. The dangers include all sorts of violent attacks, ranging from an attempted garroting in Odessa to a shootout in Tampa. The hero is often up against incredible odds, as when he’s wounded, alone in the Syrian desert, actively pursued by terrorists and “exposed in the open with a short-range AK and a close-contact handgun.” Such moments are undeniably tense. Readers will speculate how Rivers will manage to live to fight another day. What often keeps him alive is his training or what seems to be just plain good luck. Yet the bracing action can be broken up by tedious meetings and bureaucratic hurdles. While the fact that Rivers is not a rampaging gunslinger who can act with impunity whenever he wants lends the story believability, his interactions with his superiors are not always entertaining. Sometimes previous events wind up as bullet points for a report. Take, for example, part of the summation of the crime that begins the book: “Video shows one of the thieves decapitated the courier and other thieves appear agitated by the event.” Readers already know this information, and encountering it again doesn’t add much to the tale. Still, the story offers plenty of gripping scenes. Umm is not the typical Islamic terrorist found in spy thrillers, and she’s highly motivated to boot. Considering her ferocity, readers will wonder what it will take to finally stop her.
A riveting spy tale that delivers a CIA hero fighting Islamic terrorists.Pub Date: April 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798218374808
Page Count: 359
Publisher: Hot Type Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2024
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
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