Crime-fighting is hell in this gripping urban noir starring masked vigilante Matt Murdock from novelist and comic book writer Segura (Alter Ego). Blinded by a childhood accident that enhanced his other senses, Murdock lives as a Manhattan defense attorney by day and as Daredevil, unofficial protector of Hell’s Kitchen, by night. In both his law work and his superhero activities, Murdock regularly clashes with New York City crime kingpin Wilson Fisk, one of the few people who knows about his secret identity. Murdock is stunned, then, when Fisk is found shot to death in his office, leaving behind a power vacuum on the streets that’s sure to cause more bloodshed. Ultraviolent vigilante Frank Castle, aka the Punisher, turns himself in for Fisk’s murder, but Murdock is convinced that Castle is covering for someone else. Hell-bent on discovering the truth and hoping to quiet the uproar on the streets, Murdock agrees to defend Castle in court, risking his life and career in the process. Segura’s twin experience in prose and comics serves him well here: he effortlessly conjures the heightened atmosphere of a Marvel comic without tipping into cliché. Superhero fans will be delighted. Agent: Josh Getzler, HG Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Jackson’s perceptive debut introduces Martha Allen, a Scotland Yard detective who’s plunged back into a case that’s stayed with her for three decades. On an August night in 1990, five-month-old Bella Carpenter was reported missing from her London hotel room. Allen, then a newly minted detective inspector on the Metropolitan Police Force, was assigned to the case, and no leads emerged until her sharp-eyed subordinate, detective constable Manley Desbury, noticed that Bella’s father was only pretending to cry during a press conference. Spurred by Allen’s suspicion that Bella was dead before she disappeared, the detectives investigated the couple but failed to turn up anything conclusive. Eventually a teenager named Nell Beatty returned Bella to the police, and senior officers played it up as a triumphant resolution—even though Nell disappeared through a station window before she could be questioned. In the present, Nell’s body is found on a bench in Bristol, prompting Allen and Desbury to revisit Bella’s case off the books. Jackson gets the pace and details of a high-pressure investigation just right, mixing plodding procedural work and bolts of inspiration for a bracingly realistic depiction of crime-solving. Fans of moody British mysteries will cheer Jackson’s auspicious entry into the field. Agent: Laura Macdougall, United Agents. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Crime reporter Charlie Shaw becomes a private investigator after he’s furloughed during the Covid-19 pandemic in the so-so debut from sports journalist Phillips. At the outset, Charlie struggles to balance his fledgling PI career with his responsibilities as a father to a six-month-old daughter, botching a routine assignment to take photos of a cheating spouse when his baby minder app drains the battery on his phone. Soon afterward, 16-year-old runaway Friday Finley asks Charlie for help finding her deadbeat father. Charlie quickly develops paternal affection for the traumatized teen, and his investigation reveals that Friday’s father has gotten mixed up with some dangerous Bay Area criminals. Soon, someone catches wind of his pursuit, and Charlie’s own family is threatened. Charlie’s incompetence as an investigator initially provides some satisfying narrative friction, but readers might have a hard time sympathizing with him as the stakes ramp up and his clumsiness starts to feel more like fecklessness. Phillips manages a handful of genuinely sweet father-daughter moments, but slack pacing and an undercooked explanation for Charlie’s pivot to PI work undermine them. For the most part, this misses the mark. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Wildlife researcher Henderson brings a sometimes-overwhelming amount of passion and knowledge to her earnest fifth eco-thriller featuring biologist Alex Carter (after The Vanishing Kind). At the outset, Alex is working out of a tent on Honu Beach in Hawaii, where she’s observing and protecting a nest of rare hawksbill turtles with the help of local volunteers. When a hurricane starts barreling toward the island, Alex and her colleagues head to the beach, where they surprise a crew of armed poachers preparing to raid the nest. Fortunately, Alex is well trained in the martial art of jeet kune do and manages to fend off the poachers—but not before they kidnap one of her volunteers. Henderson alternates lively sequences of Alex trailing the poachers with dense lectures on the international exotic animal trade, the remains of prehistoric mammals, and the devastating effects of global warming on various endangered species. The blend of action and education grows increasingly lopsided as the narrative progresses, but there’s still enough derring-do on offer to satisfy thriller fans. Though bumpy in places, this has its charms. Agent: Alexander Slater, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

The wives, children, and courtiers of Henry VIII are shrewdly reimagined as contemporary acquaintances of billionaire businessman Hank Tudor in Olson’s entertaining sequel to An Inconvenient Wife. Lizzie, Hank’s youngest daughter, has been kidnapped from the family estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Suspects abound, including Lizzie’s mother, Nan, who quietly fled to France eight years earlier to escape the domineering Hank. Kate, Hank’s sharp former assistant turned sixth wife, is torn between her wish to help Lizzie and her distrust of Hank, from whom she has recently separated. When Kate starts receiving threats from what appear to be Lizzie’s kidnappers, she teams up with Nan to figure out what’s going on, evading questions from scuzzy reporter Tom Seymour and Hank’s dedicated corporate fixer Thomas Cromwell in the process. Mapping Olson’s sprawling cast onto their 16th-century inspirations is wicked fun for readers with even basic Tudor knowledge, and Nan (the series’ Anne Boleyn) proves a particularly fascinating protagonist. Though the conclusion of the kidnapping plot lacks punch, there are enough surprises and Easter eggs on offer to leave readers primed for the next installment. It’s royally amusing. Agent: Josh Getzler, Hannigan Getzler Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Wodhams’s fleet and fun sophomore novel (after Declan Tucker’s Grand Debut) follows a 32-year-old FBI intern and a down-on-his-luck antiques dealer as they collide with a dangerous smuggling ring. Bored by a string of ho-hum assignments, art crimes intern Kate Taylor perks up when Lucas Rosi, a handsome agent with Italy’s Carabinieri Art Squad, calls and asks for the FBI’s help tracking down an ancient marble sphinx that was stolen from an Italian museum. Kate leaps at the assignment, and dreams up a sting using valuable gold earrings once owned by Alexander the Great’s mother as bait. Meanwhile, in New York City, morally flexible antiques dealer Paul Klugman is trying to keep his business afloat to avoid working in his father’s chain of dollar stores. Self-centered and not prone to asking too many questions, Paul embraces a shady saving grace from wealthy art collector Harry, who offers him the sale of a rare vase. Eventually, Kate’s sting intersects with Paul’s business plan, entangling both in a vast conspiracy that threatens their lives. Though Wodhams’s flawed, sometimes bumbling leads can be frustrating company,, his plotting and prose are breezy and amusing. This screen-ready adventure offers a welcome dose of escapism. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Margaret (The Bequest) stumbles with this tangled mystery about a grieving archivist who researches the connection between a town’s historic witch trials and several recent deaths. Genevieve Tompkins drops out of her PhD program and moves to a tiny spa town in Upstate New York after the back-to-back deaths of her estranged father and her ex-fiancé. There, she’s hired as an archivist by the prominent Wilton family and tasked with cataloging their papers, many of which date back to the town’s founding in the 1700s and detail a series of brutal witch trials. As Genevieve settles in, a local woman vanishes, the latest in a long string of suspicious disappearances in the area. Genevieve kicks her curiosity up a notch when her friend vanishes next, and uncovers a link between the Wilton family’s pharmaceutical business and the missing women that might date all the way back to the witch trials. The truth turns out to be far darker than Genevieve initially imagined, forcing her to rethink her relationships altogether. Marred by erratic pacing and clunky dialogue, the narrative squanders its early intrigue and resolves with a series of baffling revelations that confuse rather than exhilarate. This misses the mark. Agent: Jody Kahn, Brandt & Hochman. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

Romance author Nash (Can’t Get Enough of the Duke, as Lenora Bell) pivots to thrillers with this arresting page-turner about 18-year-old American singer Bowie Bishop, who goes missing while studying abroad in New Zealand. When U.S. diplomat Lake Harlowe fields a frantic call from Bowie’s mother at the U.S. embassy in Wellington, Lake, who’s embraced the nomadic life of a diplomat as a means of escaping unresolved trauma back home in Alaska, is already grappling with another PR nightmare: the hours-old discovery of dead NFL quarterback Bruce Walter from an apparent overdose in his Airbnb. Lake’s preliminary digging into Bowie’s disappearance reveals that the teen’s mom works at a Las Vegas casino owned by Bruce’s father. The plot thickens when Lake’s new boss, a political appointee with an appetite for barely legal young women, presses her to back off from both cases. But that’s not an option for Lake, who feels an affinity with the missing teen. With the help of a hunky police sergeant, she investigates both cases in secret, exposing a web of connections that appears to link powerful predators across the globe. Though the plot flirts with implausibility, Nash, a former Foreign Service officer, crafts a provocative thriller helmed by a series-worthy protagonist. Readers won’t be able to put this down. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, CAA. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

A tradwife influencer gets trapped inside the harsh life of an early-19th-century homesteader in Burke’s crafty and cutting debut. To her millions of Instagram followers, Natalie Heller Mills is a “flawless Christian woman” leading an idyllic life on the self-sustaining Yesteryear Ranch with her hardworking husband, Caleb, and their five kids. In reality, the family’s remote Idaho farm is a money pit, Caleb is an internet-addicted conspiracist, and nannies raise the children while a live-in producer curates Natalie’s content, which pays the bills. When Natalie wakes one morning in a rustic facsimile of her home with a family that resembles hers but isn’t, it appears that she has traveled back in time to 1805. Is she a kidnapping victim, an unconsenting reality show contestant, or something more bizarre? All she knows for sure is that the bear traps and boredom of the early 19th century might kill her before she finds out (“Tomorrow, I will not have to shit in a rickety old shed outside”). Burke’s scathing satire of the conservative media complex unfolds from Natalie’s increasingly delusional first-person perspective as the action ping-pongs back and forth in time. Though the big reveal undercuts some of the book’s bite, the narrative is plenty riveting. Burke is off to an auspicious start. Agent: Lisa Grubka, UTA. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 01/23/2026 | Details & Permalink

A retired Australian geologist stumbles into a conspiracy involving precious diamonds in this intriguing thriller from Kovacic (Kill Yours, Kill Mine). After losing her husband of 40 years to cancer, Rena Novak embarks on a cross-country trip they’d planned to take together. While driving on the Great Northern Highway in Western Australia , she spots smoke and, worried about a wildfire, seeks out the source. A couple hundred meters off the highway she finds a burning Toyota with a blackened corpse inside and calls the police, who ask her to stick around for a few days while they investigate. As Rena talks to locals in the nearby town of Fitzroy Crossing, she learns that the community is divided over a proposal by a diamond-mining company that wants to start operating in the area. Then Rena discovers that the dead man was a fellow geologist whom she knew decades earlier. Haunted in part by strange inconsistencies at the site of his death, including that his car was left in neutral, she launches an investigation linking his possible murder to the diamond mine. Kovacic makes Rena a three-dimensional protagonist whose sleuthing skills are impressive yet realistic, but a few too many plot contrivances keep this from achieving its full potential. Still, it’s a good bet for fans of Jane Harper. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/09/2026 | Details & Permalink