Proof that we don’t need the Cold War for smart spy fiction.
A retired CIA officer is pulled back into a dangerous game in this spy thriller by the author of Beirut Station (2023).
Alexander Matthews retired from the CIA and started Trinity Capital, a highly successful venture capital firm that often brings him to Russia. Once he’d been the CIA’s top spy in Moscow, but that’s all behind him now. But the Agency asks him for a favor: help extricate a Russian asset code-named Byron, a KGB-trained intelligence officer whom he had recruited and who claims to have sensitive secrets the CIA wants. He’d recruited other “poets” such as Keats and Blake, but they have vanished, perhaps in the bowels of Lefortvo Prison with bullets to the skull. Matthews has good reasons to decline: His late wife and daughter, killed in a boating accident while he was away, hated his lengthy absences, and he is on the verge of being estranged from his surviving son. He’s remarried to a CIA translator, and his travel stresses that marriage. So of course he goes to Moscow and is promptly arrested on a trumped-up solicitation charge. Then the FSB tells him he’s being investigated for tax fraud. Soon, he’s reminded that it’s dangerous for a wealthy American investor in Russia to be in the tabloids. And speaking of which, Byron claims to have the FSB’s kompromat on Topcat, who’d been in Moscow for the Miss Universe contest in 2013. One CIA official calls him Apocalypse 45, but like Voldemort, no one says his name. Readers will have to figure that out. Meanwhile, Langley believes it has a mole. Matthews feels an emotional tug to Russia’s capital city: He “wasn’t from Moscow, but he was of Moscow.” He’s going to have to get over that, as he’s not safe there anymore. Can he successfully exfiltrate Byron? As tension builds to a dramatic conclusion, so does the doubt. Vivid writing sets the tone: “The vans, yellow lights flashing, swallowed the prisoners like whales swallowing krill.” The plot delivers eye-opening twists as well as insights into the Russian psyche. “In Russia,” a character says, “stories never have happy endings.” This one fits right in.
Proof that we don’t need the Cold War for smart spy fiction.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781639368853
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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