Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

Next book

LAW FIVE

A lean and enjoyable crime novel set in the sports world.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

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

Next book

THE HOUSE ACROSS THE LAKE

A weird, wild ride.

Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.

Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.

A weird, wild ride.

Pub Date: June 21, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022

Next book

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DEVLINS

As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.

The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.

The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.

As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.

Pub Date: March 26, 2024

ISBN: 9780525539704

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

Close Quickview