More a compromise than a synthesis, but nonetheless intriguing for all that.
Deaver and Maldonado’s first collaboration pits a Homeland Security investigator and her former quarry against a ring of serial killers working their way through California.
Special Agent Carmen Sanchez snaps to attention when her kid sister, Selina, is attacked and nearly killed, saved only by the intervention of a luckless good Samaritan. The crime seems random, but Carmen and Prof. Jacoby Heron, a super-hacker expert on intrusion—what he calls “someone or something deliberately entering into a place or situation where they’re unwelcome or uninvited”—she once investigated, soon link it to the very recent murder of real estate developer Walter Kemp in San Diego. The killer, identified to the sleuths by a spider tattoo on his wrist and to readers early on by the name Dennison Fallow, clearly has a plan that involves more victims, but what is that plan—and what does it have to do with cyberattacker Tristan Kane and the H8ers, a disgruntled group of men whose online whining about all the opportunities snatched away from them by the privileged few would make them pathetic if its consequences weren’t so lethal? Deaver evidently contributes the Chinese-box construction of the plot, in which the solution to each riddle seems to open new mysteries, and Maldonado provides a swiftly evoked sense of the characters’ social backgrounds. But it’s hard to tell which of them is responsible for the blistering pace, the numerous flashbacks to previous episodes that supply important details about the characters’ motivations at the cost of diluting that hard-won suspense, the stilted relationship between Carmen Sanchez and Jake Heron, or the sense of anticlimax that attends the last few revelations. A series seems inevitable.
More a compromise than a synthesis, but nonetheless intriguing for all that.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781662518713
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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