A unique action story with a compelling conceit, a tenacious lead, and believable characters.
In Doonan’s novel, the last male FBI agent must prevent war with Mexico in a future when women control the government of the former United States.
FBI agent Robert Hyde has some advantages—his late wife was wealthy, and her family is politically connected—but he has much more stacked against him. After suffering an epidemic called the Pox, the world’s population was decimated, chaos broke out, and women were hunted. After that awful period, the U.S. is now known as the Matriarchal States of America. For safety’s sake, men were left with no rights; they can’t have money, bullets, or even enjoy a soda (bottled water is all they can drink, and it is laced with a drug that prevents erections). Violence against women has plummeted, and now there is almost no femicide. Robert, who is the FBI’s last remaining male agent, has a daughter, but his senator mother-in-law wants full custody, which she can easily obtain if the father commits a crime. In the midst of this dystopian mess, Mexico is threatening war: Aztecs are amassing at the border, and Robert is sent (with a female minder) to negotiate for peace. It’s a tall order, he’s off the bottled water, and a beautiful princess named Xochil is waiting for him upon his arrival (“‘You’ll never want to leave,’ she whispers”). Doonan’s premise of a female-controlled authoritarian state is audacious, and both the novel’s backstory and present reality are full of gritty details that give the narrative a unique plausibility. The Matriarchal States isn’t a pleasant place, but Robert and other characters make wry, sarcastic observations that lighten the mood and add a necessary human aspect to the stark landscape. (It is also intriguing to see what Mexico is like in relation to the former U.S.) The characters are clearly drawn and have convincing motivations. The plot grows slightly convoluted when Robert reaches Mexico but returns to form nicely later on.
A unique action story with a compelling conceit, a tenacious lead, and believable characters.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2025
ISBN: 9798284534052
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
© Copyright 2026 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.
