A lean and enjoyable crime novel set in the sports world.
An Italian referee is thrown into the center of a corruption scandal in Disco’s debut thriller.
Milo Sant’Elia is a referee for an Italian professional football—that is, soccer—league. It’s not an easy job: He must stay as fit as the players while also performing under the gaze of the sport’s unforgiving fans: “At the highest level, when a player makes a mistake, the fans forgive them after the next touch of the ball,” explains Milo’s brother, Dino, one of the book’s narrators. “But when a referee makes a mistake, it’s inexcusable—the abuse can follow an official for the rest of their career.” However, Milo is understandably horrified when he receives a package at his home in Palermo containing an amputated human thumb—a clear message of intimidation. Milo suspects it has to do with an upcoming high-stakes match, and he refuses to go to the local police until he identifies the culprits with the help of Dino and their attorney friend, Sansone; the ref specifically fears that the Referees’ Association may have been compromised. He attempts to referee games as usual, but he quickly finds his career, and his life, under threat; a mobster, who’s part-owner of a football team, had a referee killed in a game-fixing scheme—and Milo thinks he’s next. The novel is formatted like an oral history, with multiple characters recounting memories. This epistolary style gives the book a somewhat antiquated feel, but it doesn’t hamper the story’s pacing. Disco’s prose captures a convincing conversational tone, as when Dino and Milo drive to the airport: “Milo’s car was a furnace. The engine rumbled steadily behind us….We drove with the windows down, and I don’t know how, but sitting in that heat gave me chills.” Milo is a particularly intriguing character—an aging referee and bookstore employee who lives by a rigorous code of conduct and also likes to rock out to Austrian heavy metal. The various narrative voices are distinctive, and the transitions between them add a sense of momentum to the narrative. The novel is relatively brief, and the pages mostly fly by, keeping readers pleasantly engrossed.
A lean and enjoyable crime novel set in the sports world.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 219
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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