Solid sleuthing by Arkady Renko and a good read for his fans.
Moscow police detective Arkady Renko takes on dangerous challenges on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
An acquaintance asks Renko to find his adult daughter Karina Abakova, who has “disappeared down a rabbit hole,” and Renko says he will search for her for no pay. Karina’s interests are music and politics, specifically the anti-government Forum for Democracy. The latter passion seems unwise, as “politics in Russia was for the corrupt, the brave, and the foolish.” Then an acquaintance of Renko’s is killed before they can meet, and the detective is assigned to find the man’s killer. Maybe a connection exists between Karina’s disappearance and the murder, which is the first of several. Meanwhile, long-time Renko readers will recall his lover Tatiana Petrovna, who had left him, saying he lacked ambition. And now he’s begun to show the classic signs of Parkinson’s disease. With Tatiana out of his life and him having an incurable disease, he wonders if life is worth living. Still, he carries on with what becomes two murder cases and a missing person case. One trail leads to Independence Square in Kyiv as Russia appears on the brink of launching an invasion. He crosses paths again with Tatiana, now a New York Times correspondent covering developments in Ukraine. Independence Square plays less of a role in the story than the title might suggest, with plenty of space going to Moscow and Crimea—Renko is a Moscow cop, after all. There are fascinating insights into the Russian character: “No one was better than a Russian at having a superiority complex and an inferiority complex at the same time,” and “Beer didn’t really count as alcohol in a country where men drank vodka and real men drank brake fluid.” (Oh, that can’t be true!) And yet there is sympathy, as a character laments the demise of the Soviet Union, saying “We lost everything we had for bubble gum and jeans.”
Solid sleuthing by Arkady Renko and a good read for his fans.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781982188306
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
IN THE NEWS
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.
A middle-aged woman channels her best Miss Marple when she finds herself facing a nightmare from her past as she seeks to make sense of her present.
Jane Trevally is at a crossroads of sorts. After a traumatic childhood, she sought safety and solace in marriages with wealthy men. Now twice divorced and living with her four dogs in the crumbling English country mansion that is her birthright, she’s feeling the need to do something, to take a job, when one day a runaway dog turns up on her doorstep. The dog is chipped, and with the help of a local vet and her loyal stepson, Dexter Lombardi, Jane traces the dog’s home to the edge of Hampstead Heath, in London—a place that brings back the memory of a terrifying night from her youth, when a handsome man picked her up and took her back to this very house. Everything there felt wrong; she just managed to escape, certain that if she had stayed, she would have died that night. Now, soon after knocking on the door and returning the dog, she discovers that he had run away from an Airbnb near her house, where he had been staying with a young woman who seems to have disappeared. With the help of Dexter; his father, Tony, her second ex-husband; Tony’s former security enforcer, Tobias Wilson; and her own gift for connecting with people, Jane sets out to find the woman, taking her first steps on the path to becoming a private investigator. While Jane serves as the heart of the novel, Jewell also narrates chapters from several other characters’ points of view, all of which chip away at the horror that is the house on the Heath. By slowly revealing past and present simultaneously, Jewell keeps the mystery fresh as she plays with Gothic tropes and the timeless imagery of “a house of horrors” embodying human sin. She doesn’t flinch from exploring the depths of depravity in this house—and its humans.
A haunting, timeless exploration of the evil men do—and the imprint it leaves behind.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781668033906
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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