A satisfying hit for excitement junkies.
The late Flynn’s fabled killer fights a deadly terrorist plot in this high-action thriller.
In the wake of the American withdrawal from Iraq in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein’s helicopters gas Kurdish forces. Several years later, Mitch Rapp, an assassin in the CIA’s secret Orion program, is in the Middle East to hunt down and kill a Pakistani weapons scientist. But his leads go up in smoke, and the CIA puts him on to a more pressing issue: Saddam Hussein plans to move his chemical weapons out of Iraq and into Syria. Terrorists would use them to deliver a “blow against America from which it will never recover.” Rapp will have to put a stop to that. Although he works alone, his complexion and fluency in Arabic help him blend in with the locals. He gets himself into tight, violent situations where he typically leaves a body behind. But he does have one firm rule passed on to him by CIA veteran Stan Hurley: “No innocents, no law enforcement, and no women and children.” The rest are fair game. He isn’t a superhero, but he’s extraordinarily talented and lucky. He was inspired to fight terrorists when his college girlfriend, Mary, died on Pan Am Flight 103, the plane that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. A second great love has also died, and the 20-something Rapp now lives in a “zero-sum world” with his unquenchable hatred of terrorist groups like Hezbollah. Explosions and gore come with the territory. Israel is on the case as well, and Israeli intelligence creates an attack plan code-named Double Tap, which is intended to stop the expected convoy of chemical-laden trucks. Ultimately a specific, deadly threat raises the stakes to an even more frightening level. Author Bentley remains true to the original vision of an American assassin who only kills the bad guys and comes within an inch of his life doing the job.
A satisfying hit for excitement junkies.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9781668045916
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
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