A moving, grippingly relevant mystery.
Young neo-Nazis in Rancho Santa Elena, a quiet Southern California town, conduct a campaign of hate crimes against minorities, leading police detective Ben Wade to uncover a widespread White supremacist conspiracy.
Set in 1987, this thriller focuses on Jacob, a 14-year-old boy who’s recruited into a gang of skinheads by his 20-something neighbor Ian after Ian sees him testing out homemade pipe bombs in his backyard. Ian, the son of a corrupt councilman whose eldest son was killed in Vietnam, has terrorized a Vietnamese shop owner named Bao Phan and his family by leaving a fatally poisoned, throat-slit dog by their back door. Jacob, the abused son of a traumatized Vietnam veteran, is officially inducted as a skinhead after being pressured to brutally attack Mexican migrant workers. Shocked to discover his father is having an affair with a young Vietnamese woman—Bao’s 22-year-old daughter, Linh—Jacob is overcome with rage. Meanwhile, having left the LAPD, worn down by gang wars in that city, Wade is surprised to confront an even worse form of violence in Rancho Santa Elena. In Los Angeles, there was a logic to the gang wars, which were over drugs, territory, and money. “This is just hate,” he says. “Nothing rational about it.” Though set in the past, at a time when the internet was first enabling hate groups opposed to the very existence of the federal government to link up via online bulletin boards, Drew’s sequel to Shadow Man (2017) could hardly speak more powerfully to the present moment in the United States. A terrific crime novel with an explosive climax, the book dares to find a level of empathy with its young perpetrators, connecting the dots between being frightened and “walking around in the dark” and turning to hate.
A moving, grippingly relevant mystery.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-399-59212-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Middling for an excellent series determined to drain the swamp of Washington state.
A late-night call from an old deputy of her late father’s sends a lame-duck sheriff hurtling into a disaster it will take her friend Det. Tracy Crosswhite to pull her out of.
Before his death, Buzz Almond served as sheriff of Klickitat County, Washington, for more than two decades. Now that his daughter, Jenny Almond, has lost her reelection bid, she’s waiting for the clock to tick down to her last day—but then she gets a call on her home phone that she can’t ignore. “I need to talk to Buzz,” says Anthony Alvarez, who’s been suffering from PTSD ever since his return from Vietnam. Since her father can’t, Jenny feels she has to respond herself, and her lightning-fast visit to Alvarez ends with him shot dead and her arrested for his murder. Tracy, a police academy classmate of Jenny’s, high-tails it up from Seattle along with her husband, attorney Dan O’Leary, who agrees to take on Jenny’s defense. It’s a challenging case because it’s obvious that the overwhelmed Jenny shot an unarmed Alvarez in the chest. She insists that she didn’t fire a second shot into his back, but the local police can’t find any evidence that anyone else was on the scene. Even if they could, they’d rather convict Jenny than follow up on her increasingly heated insistence that Alvarez, a person of interest in the disappearance of 15-year-old babysitter Jacquelyn Parker back in 1980, was killed because of new evidence he’d uncovered in that 45-year-old crime. As usual, Dugoni unfolds the complications in a steady stream in and out of the courtroom, and the denouement, though not exactly surprising, is highly satisfying.
Middling for an excellent series determined to drain the swamp of Washington state.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781662524752
Page Count: 415
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
© 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.
