An inventive, twist-filled escapade with amusing supernatural trappings.
In Buchman’s paranormal thriller, a nameless soul discovers that the afterlife is significantly different then he anticipated.
Instead of going straight to Oblivion, a soul finds himself shunted into the Pilot Program: The Heavenly Department of Health and Human Services puts him into a new body, and the overbearing Angel Azazel sends him on various missions. His first outing involves shutting down a gathering of Satanists and yields mixed results: He dispatches many of the Satanists and saves the woman they were about to sacrifice, but gets physically killed in the process. Rather than going to Heaven, as he’d hoped, he receives new orders, based on information in a folder that he brought back from the Satanists. The nameless soul must now locate and destroy the Book of Remedies—a lost volume of cures for all diseases in the world; to accomplish this task, he joins a living rogue named Juma and, eventually, Nora, the woman he recently rescued. He and Nora soon fall into a mutual attraction. After a series of missteps and misadventures, the trio finally locate the book, but a series of unexpected plot swerves leads the soul to use a time-trusted method to contact Azazel, who gives him one more fateful mission. Buchman’s version of the afterlife is a distinctive kind of hell in which bureaucracy and office politics reign. The Creator delegates tasks to Angels, who lord over Demons, who, in turn, rule over the “monkeys” (also known as humans). This scenario leaves the protagonist, who doesn’t even remember his mortal history, at the very bottom of this hierarchy; still, he manages to do the right thing, even though his missions have few positive outcomes. The hunt for the Book of Remedies forms the heart of the action-filled narrative, which shifts the narrative smoothly away from social commentary, although it does return on occasion. There’s adventure aplenty as the soul and his partners race across the Middle East and Asia hunting for dangerous treasure.
An inventive, twist-filled escapade with amusing supernatural trappings.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798218826673
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
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