A vast and immersive international crime thriller.
In Nichols’ debut crime novel, an aggrieved private eye takes on some of the most powerful interests in Europe.
Back in the 1980s, Lenya Fischer served as an intelligence officer for the Stasi, where her attributes—“sneaky, stealthy, a deep-diver”—earned her the nickname Der Narwhal. Now, after a stint in prison for bribery, the 63-year-old is back on the street working as one of Europe’s most tenacious corporate investigators for hire. Her current case has her looking into the activities of Peter Brunner, the scion of a lumber empire who seems to be hiding something in his Cyprus-, Malta-, and Liechtenstein-based shell companies. It won’t be an easy job: “The Brunners have been a kind of power behind the throne all across Europe since the Holy Roman Empire,” a friend warns her. “They didn’t stay on top through two world wars by being nice. They don’t like to be investigated.” Luckily, Lenya is one of the only people in the world with access to the perfect man to probe Brunner’s holdings: Orell Schneider, the so-called “007 of Money Laundering” (and Lenya’s ex-lover) whose past employers include Liechtenstein’s Financial Intelligence Unit and the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority. When Orell is killed in a car bombing just days after Lenya tries to make contact, she knows she’s being sent a warning—if Orell’s death wasn’t clear enough, the killers also take the liberty of murdering Lenya’s cat, Fritz. Perhaps the Brunners don’t like to be investigated, but Lenya is not the sort of woman to back down once blood has been spilled. “Whoever did this was a ghost trying not to see the Grim Reaper,” she fumes. (“Lenya would hang on to the bottom of a car for a thousand miles to…watch the soul leave their eyes.”) Her investigation soon reconnects her with an East Texas spy she crossed swords with during the Lebanese Civil War, as well as a cavalcade of Russian mobsters, Corsican gun-runners, and other European ne’er-do-wells who stand between her and an international conspiracy the size of a continent.
In addition to the engaging revenge plot—which is more about avenging Fritz the cat than Orell—Nichols keeps his readers entertained with an endless supply of pseudonymous spies and criminal organizations. (For example: the Black Jackals, “founded by former Serbian special ops commandos who reinvented themselves as a gang of highly sophisticated international jewel thieves after the Balkans War in the Nineties.”) Lenya is a brilliant protagonist, a Russophile and true-believer who once reported her own husband for treason (he was executed) and who now finds herself doing the bidding of some of the world’s grossest capitalists. Nichols manages to pack the last 50 years of European conflict and interconnection into her personal history, illustrating how money and those who possess it circulate heedless of national borders. As the story unfolds, the vision of our tenuous global economy and democratic order that emerges is more terrifying than anything hidden in a Liechtenstein bank. Readers will undoubtedly look forward to Lenya’s next case.
A vast and immersive international crime thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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