A finely crafted game of cat and mouse with deadly consequences.
In Hyche’s thriller, wealthy widows grieving the deaths of their longtime spouses fall prey to a sophisticated ring of scammers.
When a number of middle-aged women start mysteriously turning up dead, FBI Special Agent Jemma Rhodes is tasked with finding a connection between the grisly killings before the media provokes hysteria with stories about a serial killer on the loose. Readers know straight away that the murdered women weren’t particularly savvy about managing their money and were eager to enlist the services of a professional outfit called Financial Solutions before they met their untimely ends. With its highly accessible seminars and sunny, attentive staffers (including the affable but duplicitous Kai Dante), Financial Solutions appears to offer the kind of professional guidance the women needed after their husbands had shuffled off this mortal coil. What both the FBI and readers don’t immediately understand is why the scammers—who manage to walk away with over $12 million in under a year—would knock off their marks when they didn’t have to resort to murder. Rhodes surmises that the FBI is dealing with genius-level intelligence, along with an outsize ego. Hyche maintains a cool and methodical pace every bit as steady as the killers themselves. Uncertainty and expectation stalk every encounter in which the killer or killers might be afoot. When the author reports, in ostensibly bland terms, “She checked her appearance one more time and then picked up her phone and headed toward the kitchen in search of her purse, keys, and grocery list. Finding it all, she left through the garage door,” keyed-up readers will fear the woman will never return through that door again. While Hyche keeps the suspense taught, the forensic nature of the narrative does threaten to chill the proceedings to an uncomfortable degree. On the other hand, the anguish the survivors feel as they look to returning hero Jemma Rhodes for answers packs a genuine sense of human emotion that’s hard to shake off after the final page is turned.
A finely crafted game of cat and mouse with deadly consequences.Pub Date: March 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798307308066
Page Count: 358
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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