Kingfisher Seven by Shawn Klomparens

Published by Thomas & Mercer on August 12, 2025

The protagonist of Kingfisher Seven is Jake Moran because (take note, aspiring thriller writers) every thriller hero must be named Jake or Jack. Jake is a former Marine because all thriller heroes named Jake or Jack are former Marines unless they are former Navy Seals. Jake had classified military experience with rocket launches and now has his own business that provides services to companies that launch rockets.

Helena Nash (we are told) is a model for female entrepreneurs. Engineers and other tech-savvy people dream of working for her. Why that’s true is never made clear. Perhaps she generates the same enthusiasm as Elon Musk did when he was only seen as a tech entrepreneur, although we see none of that in the narrative. Helena operates Kingfisher, a company that might remind readers of SpaceX, except that Helena doesn’t dance around with chainsaws. Perhaps doing so would make her more interesting.

Jake’s company is providing Kingfisher with meteorological data to support its tests of a rocket that is carrying a nuclear generator. Helena’s son Dylan is among the environmental protestors who question the wisdom of sending plutonium into space, given the tendency of rockets (at least those of SpaceX) to explode before they enter orbit.

Jake’s helicopter crashes on its way to the island that houses Kingfisher. It is obvious to everyone that the helicopter was hit with a drone, but it takes the pilot and passengers a surprising amount of time to draw that conclusion. It takes them even longer to identify the specific target of that attack. To be fair, that’s part of the puzzle and the answer isn’t easily guessed.

Helena hires Jake to do a complete audit of the company and its security. This happens just in time for Jake to become an action hero and foil an attempt at sabotage. Russian criminals are carrying out a complex and improbable plot to hack Kingfisher’s systems and turn one of its tests into an actual launch, transforming the rocket into a weapon. They kidnap Dylan to further their goal. Their motive for attacking the US is again part of the puzzle that the reader and Jake must solve. The answer is plausible.

To save a city from radioactive fallout and figure out how to rescue Dylan, Jake enlists the usual sidekicks: the ex-Navy pilot who flew the helicopter that crashed; his beautiful and highly competent business partner Tamara Rinaldi, his genius tech employee Stu Gallagher; and Kingfisher’s flight director (another former colleague of Jake because Jake knows everyone) Andy Lang. All the central characters together have less personality than a bag of uncooked rice. A mild conflict between Stu and Andy fizzles away before it can add tension to the story.

Kingfisher Seven delivers the usual action scenes that justify its label as a thriller. The plot is unsurprising, but the action scenes are credible, in part because Jake isn’t required to be a superhero. He spends less time fighting and more time climbing launch platforms as he races to save the day before burning up in the rocket’s exhaust.

Shawn Klomparens apparently did a good bit of research into the mechanics of a private rocket launch. The detailed atmosphere helps the plot sustain credibility. While I can’t say that the characters are memorable, the story delivers just enough excitement to merit a recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

Salt Bones by Jennifer Givhan

Published by Mulholland Books on July 22, 2025

“No one knows it’s a horror story when it begins.” Set in Southern California near the Salton Sea, the horror in Salt Bones involves girls who go missing. Mal Veracruz’s sister Elena disappeared 25 years earlier, as did a girl named Noemi. The authorities decided that Elena was a runaway, but Mal doesn’t believe that. Nor did the authorities have a good history of investigating the disappearances of women with Mexican ancestries.

Now a girl named Renata is missing. Mal’s brother is a cop and at least he’s assuming Renata was a crime victim, but he hasn’t uncovered any evidence of her fate. The first third of the story sets up the disappearance of Mal’s daughter Amaranta a week later.

Griselda and Amaranta are sisters. Their mother Mal is a butcher at the carnicería. Mal’s brother Estaban (known to most as Steve) is a lawyer who works for the Callahans, the rich landowners in the Imperial Valley. Estaban is married to Sharon, a former mayor who no longer puts her law degree to any obvious use. Estaban plans to run for the Senate, but many suspect he will help the rich get richer while forgetting his roots.

Mal’s brother Benito (known to most as Benny) is a police officer and an enemy of the Callahans because of their entitlement and power. Mal raised Benny, who was all but abandoned by their mother after Elena disappeared. Mal’s mother suffers from dementia and, on bad days, blames Mal for the loss of Elena.

Griselda’s BFF is Harlan, another Callahan. She’s shagging him despite the Veracruz war with the Callahan family. Griselda and Harlan engage in environmental/animal rights protests. One night, they rescue (or steal, depending on your perspective) calves from the Callahan ranch. Amaranta accompanies Griselda on the rescue operation. It doesn’t end well for a cowboy who tries to stop them. Not long after that incident, Amaranta disappears.

A couple of theories might explain Amaranta’s disappearance. One applies to all the missing girls. A monster has taken them — a chupacabra or a supernatural beast with a human body and the head of a horse known as La Siguanaba. Mal believes she saw La Siguanaba when Elena disappeared. She has more recently glimpsed the beast and often smells its urine.

Another theory is that a human monster took the girls — perhaps a local sex offender or Gustavo Castillo, a man the valley residents suspect of killing Noemi, his daughter. Griselda worries that her environmental activism invited retaliation, but Griselda’s fear would not explain the disappearance of Renata. Mal worries that her relationship with Gustavo might be behind Amaranta’s disappearance. The reader might need a spreadsheet to keep track of suspects and motives.

Other horror elements, not necessarily related to the supernatural, pop up to add new dimensions to the story. Kids are collecting jars of blood. Loose teeth appear at regular intervals. A suspect has snakes coiled around his neck. A hidden room seems devoted to an odd sort of taxidermy. A locked room mysteriously opens. Mal has horrific visions and nightmares that might be a window to a forgotten reality.

An undercurrent of domestic drama gains force in the novel’s second half. Two characters discover the true identities of their fathers. Parents discover the sexual identities of their children. Estaban’s kids act out in spooky ways because neither he nor his wife give them the attention they crave. Mal’s hidden relationship with Gus is troubling to her kids.  

A character recognizes that these are elements of a trashy telenovela (Mal’s father, as if exemplifying that observation, brandishes a cane at a man hugging his daughter and exclaims, “Get away from my daughter! El Diablo!”), but those moments integrate well with the larger plot. Slut shaming and abusive gossip are subtle themes that add weight to the story without overshadowing it. The power disparity between the rich and poor (by controlling water distribution, the wealthy are stealing from the poor) is another theme.

Part horror novel and part domestic drama, Salt Bones is a thriller in full. The story moves at a relentless pace. It generates excitement and ends in a flurry of credible action. Nearly every character is a plausible suspect in at least one disappearance, making the mystery difficult to solve. The link between the disappearance of Mal’s sister a quarter century earlier and the recent disappearances of her daughter and Renata is also plausible, if a bit unlikely. While it’s not a spoiler to assure the reader that La Siguanaba is not a suspect, the novel will end with characters sharing a belief in the beast’s reality while changing their opinion about its motivation.

A heavy smattering of Spanish runs through the novel, natural enough for characters with Mexican roots. I don’t have much Spanish but I found it easy to follow, so I imagine most readers will be able to cope. Salt Bones is one of the smarter thrillers I’ve read this year, making it one of the easiest to recommend.

RECOMMENDED

Ink Ribbon Red by Alex Pavesi

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 22, 2025

Ink Ribbon Red is the color of fictional blood. Or so says Marcin, one of the people — along with Phoebe, Janika, Maya, and Dean — who have gathered at the end of May 1999 to celebrate Anatol’s thirtieth birthday. Anatol was supposed to pick up Janika at the train station, but he ran a mysterious errand, forcing Janika to walk to his house after she tired of waiting for him. Janika begins to think that Anatol doesn’t want her there, but why?

As a birthday gift, Anatol wants his five guests to join him in a game. After writing their names on two slips of paper and placing them in separate bowls, each player draws one name from each bowl. One name is a killer and the other is a murder victim. Each player must write a murder mystery, describing how the killer does away with the victim.

Shortly before Anatol’s birthday, his addled and creepy father Gus was electrocuted in the bath while listening to the radio. Anatol’s friends suspect that Gus was murdered but Anatol has an alibi. Anyway, although nobody liked Gus, Anatol’s motive is unclear. Although Anatol will inherit his father’s house, he’ll need to sell it to pay the inheritance tax.

The weekend passes slowly. Some guests have the hots for each other. Anatole has been sleeping with Maya every few months. Dean is married to Yulie (who had an affair of her own) and seizes the weekend opportunity to shag her sister Phoebe. Dean needs to tell Phoebe that Yulie is pregnant but has trouble finding the right time. One of the characters says “Everyone’s sleeping with everyone. This is like a soap opera.” Fortunately, it’s not, although the characters' sexual escapades add litle to the story.

Multiple murders occur during the course of the weekend. A character is thrown out a window. Another is impaled on a sundial. Another dies in a fire. But are the murders real or just the stories that the guests wrote for the game? And which guests wrote which stories? Separating fictional reality from fictional fiction is the interesting challenge that Alex Pavesi poses to the reader.

As the reader tries to puzzle out whether any of the murders are real, other crimes complicate the plot. Characters receive unsigned letters that might be interpreted as blackmail threats. The letter to Anatol says I HAVE PHOTOS. Phoebe’s says I KNOW. Phoebe wonders if her letter might have come from Yulie or from Yulie’s friend Maya, who is also Phoebe’s best friend.

Marcin’s letter says INSIDER TRADING. When Marcin receives his letter, he assumes the insider trading that made him rich has been discovered. But the only person to whom he confessed his crime was Maya, who thought the crime was too boring to discuss with anyone else. Or maybe that’s just what she's telling Marcin.

Perhaps someone is trying to blackmail Maya with nude photos in lurid poses that an old boyfriend took of her (back in the innocent 90s when nudity was scandalous). Are the photos real or part of another story?

Ink Ribbon Red benefits from a carefully constructed plot. The story is clever. Perhaps too clever. The blackmail plot, once revealed, seems impossibly complicated. The blackmail victims could have been blackmailed without gathering for a story-writing weekend. Pavesi juggles the timelines, a common literary device, but one that has no obvious purpose here, apart from adding to the confusion. There are two true murders among all the imagined killings, but neither will shock the reader. The reader will suspect the truth behind one death from the novel’s early moments, while the other seems contrived to justify all the fictional killing that precedes it. A final death (not a murder) is both contrived and hard to swallow.

Nor is this a story that will encourage the reader’s emotional investment in any character. They could all be murdered and the reader would probably greet their demise with indifference. I recommend Ink Ribbon Red for its unique construction and noteworthy prose, but this isn’t a novel I would expect most readers to rave about.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Behind Sunset by David Gordon

Published by Mysterious Press on July 22, 2024

Elliott Gross is surprised to learn that wealthy and powerful people want, in addition to wealth and power, self-respect. Elliott lacks wealth and power and can’t afford self-respect.

Behind Sunset opens in 1994. Elliott works in the Los Angeles porn industry. He writes inventive copy to accompany photos published in Raunchy, a magazine that seems suspiciously similar to Hustler. Elliott’s wheelchair-bound boss, Victor Klingman, is suspiciously similar to Larry Flynt.

Elliott is “a highly educated, twenty-five-year-old American pissing away his prime for $ 6.9230 an hour after taxes if you figured on a ten-hour day. He understands that the magazine’s models, mostly from Russia and Eastern Europe, are being exploited, but he also understands that they are making the most money they have ever made, “probably for the easiest, least degrading work.” He can live with his modest role in their questionable exploitation because it is the only job Elliott could find that made use of the master’s in English “that he’d ruined his credit struggling to pay for.”

Elliott’s work has made him “a kind of porn magician, glancing at each photo just long enough to improvise a backstory for the inane action, pulling aliases out of a name-your-baby book, and churning out the copy as fast as his fingers could type.” His prose style (“I have always fantasized about feeling two dudes in my butt at one time”) fits perfectly into 1990s porn, not that I would know, ahem.

Back in 1994, visual recordings were still preserved on video tape. Characters occasionally discuss the mysterious internet as the wave of the future (“I’ve got a hunch this web thing is going to be big,” one of them tells Elliot), but VHS is still the go-to choice for recording sex acts.

The plot involves a few videotapes that will either titillate Raunchy’s readers or give Victor the opportunity for blackmail. One involves a celebrity who feigns outrage at being recorded. Another involves a conservative Congressman who is in the company of a much younger man. The video proves that “when he wasn’t excoriating sinners, the congressman gave great head.” Hypocrisy is one of the book’s themes, although the hypocrisies of the 1990s seem quaint compared to those that are dominating the current news cycle.

Another theme is feminism; specifically, whether women, like men, are equally entitled to be proud of their promiscuity. A porn actress tells Elliot “I’m a feminist and I’m doing this for myself, not for anyone else. I’m not sexually fucked up. I have orgasms everyday. I love sex. I love men. I used to be afraid of men, but now I understand them and I have the power.” Good for her.

My favorite theme is the notion that sexual blackmail only succeeds because people feel scandalized by behavior that isn’t terribly significant. “So what if you like to be spanked or wear a tutu?,” Elliot wonders, but he is clearly ahead of his time.

The plot takes off when the next Raunchy covergirl, Crystal Waters, goes missing. Victor assigns Elliot to find her and to recover a video that she took with her. Who is on the video? That reveal treats the reader to one of the story’s surprises.

Victor eventually realizes that he once knew Crystal Waters, although he knew her by her real name, well before she was displaying her body for cash. When Victor tracks her down, she’s engaged to a movie star and is no longer interested in being a nude model.

Meanwhile, Elliot’s childhood friend, Pedro Plotkin, hires him to make duplicates of self-help videos that are recorded by Melody Bright, “a former hippie, failed singer-songwriter, and washed-up party girl until her awakening, when she began channeling the spirit of an otherworldly, thousand-year-old entity known as Zona, who educated Melody about the true nature of reality, the existence of angels, the fate of the spirit after death and so on.” Whether the self-help industry is a step up from the porn industry is debatable, but self-help charlatans, like porn stars, are appropriate fodder for comedy.

The story benefits from a steady supply of raunchy humor, sometimes fueled by boob jobs and vagina tightening (“I’d let you touch it,” Misty said, “but I just got back together with my ex-husband and it was a Father’s Day gift to him.”). The fact that Elliot regularly stumbles upon dead bodies gives the novel the trappings of a crime story that succeeds as an amusing but slightly dark comedy. The reveals (the content of the missing video and the killer’s identity) are fun, but the story depends less on mysteries than on sympathy for Elliot as he stumbles his way through a life he never wears comfortably.

I’ve enjoyed David Gordon’s Joe the Bouncer novels. He brings the same humor (with a ribald edge) to Behind Sunset. This is a good beach read for hot afternoons when a reader will be happier to reflect on scandalous behaviors of the past than to watch news of scandalous behavior in the present.

RECOMMENDED

Pariah by Dan Fesperman

Published by Knopf on July 22, 2025

Pariah is built upon the kind of plot that intrigued Hitchcock. A person with no particular connection to international intrigue becomes embroiled in a spy story that threatens his life. Dan Fesperson gives the plot a new spin by making the protagonist something of a loser who does his best spying while drunk.

Hal Knight is not exactly Al Franken, but he’s a comedian/actor who got elected to Congress before he lost his seat because of untoward behavior. While Franken was railroaded over relatively benign conduct that was far too trivial to warrant the loss of his job, Hal engaged in the kind of sexual harassment on a movie set (including the brief exposure of his reproductive organ) that gets people fired.

Hal is hiding in a small island in the Caribbean when the novel begins. He hasn’t checked social media and isn’t aware that he’s been invited by tweet to visit Bolrovia, a small nation that was once part of the Soviet Union. Its dictator, Nikolai Horvatz, is a fan of Hal’s trashy movies — the kind that depend on jiggling breasts to supplement the laughs. Hal has no desire to bring more attention to himself, but a team of CIA agents convince him that he will be serving the nation by accepting the offer and doing a bit of snooping. The CIA has few agents on the ground in Bolrovia because the head of Horvatz’s security service, Branko Sarič, has eliminated most of them.

The CIA knows that Horvatz is up to something nefarious but they aren’t sure what. Hal’s assignment is to keep his eyes open and report what he sees. The chance to serve his country might rehabilitate his image when the public learns of it and, in any event, Hal agrees because he has nothing better to do. Knowing that his phone and computer will be monitored, agents give Hal a notebook with instructions for dropping off his reports in exchange for blank replacement pages.

In Bolrovia, Pavel Lukov is assigned to mind Hal. Lukov has no great love for Horvatz and even less for his boss Sarič, so the reader might feel sorry for him when Hal evades him for enough time to drop off his reports. It seems likely that innocent Lukov will be blamed when events take a wrong turn.

Hal also meets some Americans in Bolrovia who might be involved with Horvatz’s nefarious scheme. Fesperson hides the nature of the scheme for most of the novel so I won’t reveal it. I can say that it is credible and, for a welcome change, doesn’t involve nuclear bombs.

Hal is in over his head, as he demonstrates when he drunkenly sends a message to his ex that he hopes Sarič won’t understand. As the reader might expect, Hal’s mission goes tits up after he learns about Horvatz’s secret plan. At that point, Pariah turns into an action novel as Hal (with the help of CIA agents who go rogue rather than abandoning their asset) scrambles to escape from Bolrovia. Shootouts ensue. Hal’s focus is on not getting shot but he does manage to contribute to the action.

The reader will likely hope that Hal learns something from his disgraced exit from Congress and his foolishly heroic escapades in Bolrovia. One of the novel’s best moments occurs when Hal, delivering a standup comedy performance for Horvatz, embarrasses the dictator in a way that goes over his head. By the time anyone has the nerve to tell Horvatz that he has been made the butt of a joke, Hal is eluding Sarič’s goons and running for his tragically wasted life.

The other memorable moment involves Lukov’s decision to deliver Hal to Sarič or to betray his leader and put his life at risk by helping Hal escape. A good moral dilemma is an essential ingredient of top-notch spy fiction. While Hal’s  actions are driven by self-interest or intoxication, Lukov needs to decide whether he is prepared to make the sacrifices that accompany resistance to a dictator. Fesperman allows the reader to feel all the arbitrary violence that dictators depend upon to control their populations.

Making the protagonist a comedian allows Fesperman to introduce humor into the plot, but comedy is not the novel’s focus. Instead, the life-changing decisions forced upon Hal and Lukov add substance and heart to the story. Fesperman achieves a workable balance of humor and pathos without sacrificing the thrills that spy novel fans crave.

RECOMMENDED