A flawed but entrancing thriller set in a small-town Oregon.
A washed-up lawyer stumbles upon a missing persons case in Jackson’s debut thriller.
Jacksonville, Oregon, seemed like the perfect place for Braxton Hayward to drink away his misery (he’s suffering from a failed marriage, a ruined law career, and bankruptcy) and try his hand at writing. In the weeks since he moved to the small, rustic town, however, he’s been haunted by hallucinations: An unseen voice repeats the mysterious phrase, “In Terra Lios,” and a group of ghostly bodies hangs suspended from the branches of a tree. Braxton tries to brush them off as drunken dreams, but things start to feel a lot more real when a family of three—the local art gallery owner Elle Harris, her police officer fiancé, and young son—abruptly disappears from town. As law enforcement and the media descend on the area to search for the missing trio, Braxton, who met Elle recently and once dreamed of joining the FBI, can’t help but get invested in the case…especially after bumping into the very attractive FBI agent Riley McAvoy, who has come down from Portland to work it. Elle’s 3-year-old son soon turns up alive, but not his parents. What’s more, a second couple goes missing as well. His lawyerly intuition reawakened, Braxton digs into the mystery, which seems to involve a long-standing rivalry between two prominent families in Jacksonville. The question is, are Elle and her fiancé dead, or have they simply run away? And if they have run away, what are they running from? As Braxton discovers unusual connections between himself and some of the major players, he may have to turn the question back on himself: What exactly is Braxton running from? And can learning the fate of Elle Harris help him to face it?
Jackson’s understated but fluid prose pulls the reader along with Braxton into the shifting center of the case. “Inside, the atmosphere was abuzz,” he notices, striding into the town’s bar the morning after the disappearances. “People huddled around the wooden tables, their conversations a mix of speculation and concern. Braxton caught fragments as he navigated his way to an open stool: ‘Could it be something sinister?’ ‘What if they just ran off together?’ ‘She seemed so grounded.’” Braxton is a slightly unsympathetic protagonist, perhaps to a greater degree than the author means for him to be—he’s an alcoholic mostly lacking in charm or humor or even a notably tragic backstory. (His divorce was amicable; his bankruptcy was due to him being forced to cover the legal fees of a school district that beat him in court.) The plot is filled with little unearned coincidences, and none of the supporting characters are terribly complex. Even so, there’s a stickiness to the mystery, and to Braxton’s sincere attraction to it, which retroactively deepens the impact of his initial purposelessness. The setting is richly rendered, charming by daylight but thoroughly sinister in the night. The ending probably precludes further cases following Braxton the lawyer-detective, but readers will be eager to discover what future intrigues Jackson may have up his sleeve.
A flawed but entrancing thriller set in a small-town Oregon.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Fast-moving and disturbingly plausible.
Robots may be the future of warfare in this final father-son DeMille collaboration.
In Camp Hayden, Army Maj. Roger Ames is found dead, his skull crushed. Chief Warrant Officers Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor, special agents of the United States Army Criminal Investigation Division, are sent to the Mojave Desert, “a.k.a. in the middle of nowhere,” to investigate. In this fictional military installation, Army Rangers conduct field training exercises with lethal autonomous weapons. These “dangerous new toys,” nicknamed “tin men,” may become the future of warfare if they can be programmed to distinguish between friend and foe. Anyway, the Rangers’ job is to train the tin men, not the other way around. They are AI-driven robotic prototypes called D-17s, but even prototypes can kill. Did a bot kill the major? And was there criminal liability or intent, or was it a tragic accident? Brodie and Taylor discover that not everyone loves these beasts, and they must find out if humans are programming them for mischief or even trying to set up the program for failure. Meanwhile, the bots have nicknames. Bot number 20 is Bucky, seen on a video as a “seven-foot-tall titanium machine with hands covered in blood and brain matter” that has “a face but no eyes, with hands but no skin, with a body but no soul.” As scary as these beasties are, Brodie and Taylor must also look at the humans at Camp Hayden, because they learn that the “machines don’t have motives….They have inputs and outputs,” which naturally come from human programmers. They have neither brains nor courage nor honor; they do have brute force, speed, and agility. Obviously, plenty goes haywire in this enjoyable yarn. It feels a bit too believable for comfort, and that’s to the DeMilles’ credit as storytellers. Nelson DeMille had begun this project with his son Alex, who had to finish it alone after his father’s death.
Fast-moving and disturbingly plausible.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781501101878
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
