An uneven historical thriller that features a compelling central relationship.
A crime-fighting couple’s consuming love for each other is put to the test when they’re recruited to identify a global counterfeiter in Haddon’s sequel.
After husband-and-wife team Tommy and Hannah Sinclair break up a human trafficking ring and a drug-dealing operation, the FBI asks them to use their skills and talents for a new mission. An international counterfeiting organization of unknown origin has emerged in the United States, France, and Italy, and the pair must determine who’s behind it. Tommy has an eidetic memory, which will be useful when it comes to dealing with bank-note serial numbers, as well as a handy background as a gambler and Mafia associate. Hannah, 14 years his junior, is his able partner, but she’s not pleased that this new assignment may require him to seduce the counterfeiter’s vulnerable wife. “She’ll fall in love with you,” Hannah cries. “I won’t let that happen,” he responds. Hannah has a dangerous role to play in the undercover operation, as well, although she’s only recently recovered from injuries from the previous mission; she’s also wrestling with the psychological trauma of a miscarriage. Nonetheless, like Tommy, she’s ready to get back to work. Haddon dutifully fills in backstory for readers who may be unfamiliar with the first volume in this series, and the beginning passages will quickly hook them: “We haven’t heard from [the FBI] for over a year. The last time was when I shot Lord George Gillingham.” Tommy and Hannah are a disarmingly charming couple to find at the center of a tale of global intrigue. However, Haddon’s scene-setting is less skillful, as one never gets a sense of the era in which the story takes pace; indeed, it’s only in the author’s “Final Thoughts” that readers learn that the tale is set in the ’50s. Romance fans, however, will warm to Hannah’s intense devotion to Tommy and the couple’s passionate (and graphic) bouts of lovemaking; readers’ mileage may vary, though, when Tommy tells a willing Hannah, “I want to leave my mark on you so you won’t forget me while I am away.”
An uneven historical thriller that features a compelling central relationship.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64628-819-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Tensile Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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