Happy New Year!

The Cyclist by Tim Sullivan

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Grove Atlantic on January 13, 2026

It isn’t easy being George Cross. It’s easy enough for him to perform his investigative duties as a Detective Sergeant — in fact, he excels at them — but interacting with other people requires supreme mental effort. Cross is on the spectrum. He doesn’t make small talk and is distracted from his thoughts when others do. He is often perceived as rude because he doesn’t recognize and respond to social cues. He doesn’t want “to have to deal with social interactions and be on his best behaviour” because it takes too much energy.

Yet the same condition that impairs his ability to socialize contributes to his intense focus, his ability to organize and compartmentalize, and his obsession with detail. The same skill he brings to jigsaw puzzles — recognizing patterns — helps him identify clues to murders. When people depart from their patterns, they must have a reason. If their departures coincide with a crime, Cross looks for a connection.

Tim Sullivan is far from the only author who has used autistic behaviors to create intriguing characters, but George Cross is one of the best in crime fiction. It would be easy to exploit Cross's social ineptness for laughs. While Sullivan gives his readers the opportunity to laugh, he does so with sensitivity. He looks at Cross through the eyes of his colleagues, helping the reader understand Cross’ autism from different perspectives.

Cross is exasperating to others (he would be a handful to work with) but he’s tolerated because of his success as a detective. His current partner, DS Josie Ottey, is sticking around because she’s starting to understand Cross. By being patient, she’s also helping him recognize social cues and respond appropriately — a task that Cross sometimes and only grudgingly appreciates.

For the sake of maintaining a cordial work environment, most people go out of their way to avoid offending co-workers. They tell white lies. They might say, “Oh, she just stepped out for coffee” instead of “She’s avoiding you because you criticized her.” Cross will have none of that. He doesn’t care if he offends others and his feathers aren’t ruffled when other workers share unpleasant observations. In his words: “If only more people just told the truth instead of hiding behind badly concocted, feeble excuses. Everything would be so much more straightforward.”

Cross’ gruff personality is the hook that sets this series apart from others. Cross has no tact because he doesn’t understand the need for it. In his view, tact is a barrier to honesty. Others might see him as rude and blunt; he sees himself as getting to the point with maximum efficiency. While he isn’t endearing to others, the window that Sullivan opens to Cross’ life makes it possible to sympathize with his struggle to interact socially. And even if Cross is socially awkward, it is easy to understand some of his peeves, including his disdain for social media (“I don’t know how people find the time, and why on earth do they think their lives are of such interest to other people?”).

As the title suggests, this installment's murder victim is a cyclist. George rides a bicycle to work and follows the sport of competitive cycling. He instantly recognizes the corpse on an autopsy table as a cyclist, given his low body fat, muscular thighs, and distinct tan lines just above the knee. The murder victim — found in a garage that is scheduled to be demolished — turns out to be Alexander Paphides. Alex worked in his family’s Greek restaurant, but he was an avid cyclist who, when last seen by his family, was planning to depart for a competition with the other members of his amateur cycling club.

George’s investigation follows clues related to performance-enhancing drugs, as well as a pharmacist and fellow cyclist who denies knowledge of Alex’s doping. But could the murder have been related to Alex’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend? Alex was 32 but his relationship with Debbie was more than platonic. Alex was at odds with his brother and father about the future of the family business, while Debbie seems fearful of Alex’s mother.

Ongoing issues in Cross’ life all focus on relationships, particularly with his father, his co-workers, and a local priest. Cross dutifully has dinner once a week with his father but is disturbed to the point of panic when his father wants to change the dinners from Wednesday to Thursday. Cross has no religious beliefs (his analytic mind demands evidence to support any belief) but he enjoys playing the organ. A local church allows him to practice on its organ if he keeps it tuned, but Cross resists the priest’s effort to coax him into performing a recital for the parish. This all contributes to an unusual but welcome degree of characterization for the series protagonist.

When all the clues point to a particular suspect, most police detectives are happy to declare victory, arrest the suspect, and move on to the next case. Even if all the clues don’t point in the same direction, most detectives will pick a suspect and ignore the clues that are inconsistent with the detective’s theory of guilt. Not Cross. He infuriates his boss by insisting that the investigation continue until every detail fits into the puzzle perfectly. With Cross, if one fact doesn’t fit, either the fact is untrue or the puzzle hasn’t been solved. And so, just when it seems that one suspect is guilty, Cross discovers that the crime is not quite as simple as the detectives imagined.

The mystery of Alex’s murder is multi-faceted. While a reader might solve part of the puzzle, it may take a reader who is as focused as Cross to spot all the clues that lead to a full resolution. I am grateful to Grove Atlantic for bringing this entertaining British series to American readers.

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Merry Christmas!

Vengeance by Rick Campbell

Published by St. Martin's Press on December 16, 2025

Rick Campbell’s Trident Deception novels are in equal measures spy stories, action stories, and submarine warfare stories. This is a pleasant blend of genres I enjoy, but Campbell excels at underwater action. Submarines are the reason I look forward to these novels.

Vengeance begins with an assassin shooting the Secretary of Defense moments after he threatened sanctions against Russia. Video analysis reveals that former Navy SEAL Lonnie Mixell was the shooter. Mixell recently murdered the wife of his former best friend and fellow SEAL, series protagonist Jake Harrison. The protagonist checks all the boxes that action novel authors seem to require, in that he’s named Jake (Jack being an acceptable alternative) and is a former SEAL (any other special forces background being an acceptable alternative).

Jake blames his former girlfriend, CIA Director Christine O’Connor, for his wife’s death and has made himself scarce. O’Connor would normally task Jake and specialized skills officer Khalila Dufour with finding Mixell, but Jake is in the wind and Khalila is in hot water for killing the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations. Christine decides the Agency needs to track down Jake and get him on the case.

In an earlier novel, Brenda Verbeck was forced to resign as Secretary of the Navy after she tried to cover up her brother’s plot to sell centrifuges to Iran. Although she arranged for witnesses against her brother to die and is lucky not to be in prison, she has a bug up her bum about the president’s refusal to stand behind her. Now Verbeck wants Mixell to assassinate the president. Her hairbrained scheme drives much of the story.

The last significant plot element involves the new Russian president and his plan to invade Ukraine. In this fictional version of reality (one in which the US has fought recent naval battles against Russia), the US assesses Russia’s limited objective as capturing a corridor that links Crimea to Russia rather than a wholesale invasion of Ukraine. The US persuades NATO countries to back sanctions against Russia, which Russia intends to counter by sinking oil transports that travel through the Gulf of Hormuz, forcing western nations to buy Russian oil and gas. This gives Campbell a chance to bring back series regular Murray Wilson, captain of the submarine USS Michigan.

Jake’s first mission is to lead a team charged with destroying centrifuges that Iran received from Russia and installed inside a mountain complex. The fictional president is concerned that bunker-buster bombs won’t penetrate with sufficient depth to do the job, creating the need for Jake’s heroics. They must escape the mountain before the timer-activated explosives detonate, promoting typical thriller tension as the heroes encounter obstacles to the successful completion of their mission.

It's a bit disappointing (or at least it was to me) that a submarine doesn’t enter the plot until chapter 30 (of 89). When a Russian sub starts sinking tankers, the US Navy makes an ineffective response. Submarines make no significant return until chapter 47 while the Michigan plays no significant role until chapter 54. The action is furious after that point. I always enjoy scenes involving two submarine captains devising strategies as they try to blow each other out of the water. Submarine warfare dominates the novel’s second half.

Jake has another chance to play hero when Mixell seeks vengeance for the events in an earlier novel that caused the death of Mixell’s lover, events that Mixell blames upon Jake and Christine. As is common in modern thrillers, the plot depends on a number of improbabilities, including Christine’s convenient presence when Mixell tries to orchestrate his assassination plot. I suppose her capture by Mixell as part of his vengeance scheme is an inevitable conclusion to a story arc involving Jake, Christine, and Mixell. Jake’s response is the predictable fare of action thrillers.

Also improbable is Russia’s attack on civilian shipping and its effort to sink an American aircraft carrier. Why doesn’t this act of war spark a direct American (and likely NATO) assault on Russia? I suppose Campbell didn’t want to go there because — although the series is already an alternate history — a departure from the real world of that magnitude would turn it into science fiction. Still, the president’s response is both less vigorous than the circumstances warrant and pleasantly at odds with the current president’s indifference to Ukraine.

The series has made a point of telling the reader that Jake always loved Christine and only married his wife because Christine twice turned down his marriage proposals before he gave up and married someone else. That dynamic is also resolved in this book, although I won’t spoil the outcome for those who can’t guess it. The interplay of Jake and Christine (with a brief glimpse of Jake in bed with Khalila) has grown a bit tedious, so I was glad to see it end. Jake’s decision to shag Khalila is interesting, given that Khalila was thinking about killing him in an earlier book. She’s toned down her psychopathic tendencies, which actually makes her a less interesting character, although she manages to indulge her darker instincts before the story ends.

The political machinations and the soap operatic drama involving Jake and Christine have always been secondary to my enjoyment of the submarine warfare in this series. The former plot elements are about average for a modern thriller and would in themselves warrant a mild recommendation to thriller fans. To fans of submarine stories, however, I give a much stronger recommendation for this novel and the series as a whole.

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Dead Ringer by Chris Hauty

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on December 2, 2025

Celebrated authors like Don DeLillo and Stephen King have used John F. Kennedy’s assassination as the springboard for fascinating plots. Less celebrated writers have done the same with varying results. Chris Hauty joins the crowd with a story that imagines a conspiracy involving a shadowy Catholic organization that oversaw many of the world’s most significant assassinations, including JFK, RFK, and MLK.

Hauty’s conspirators are concerned that America is tilting toward progressive policies that failed to challenge godless communists. In defiance of history and the US Constitution, the conspirators embrace the popular but mistaken notion that America’s founders meant for the US to be a Christian nation. The First Amendment demonstrates the fallacy of their belief, as does the constitutional prohibition against establishing a religious test for public office, but the conspirators in Dead Ringer want to destroy the Constitution by turning the US into a Catholic theocracy.

Hauty’s protagonist is Joe Mingus. Hauty’s Joe works as a bouncer at a strip club in Baltimore (not to be confused with David Gordon’s Joe the Bouncer, who works at a strip club in Queens). While Joe the Bouncer is a former Special Forces operative, Joe Mingus is a former Secret Service agent who was charged with protecting the president. Mingus made an error of judgment as he tried to protect a fellow agent from a sex scandal. He lost his job and earned a felony conviction that prevents him from carrying a firearm.

The story begins with Olivia Heller, an information specialist with the National Archives. Olivia stumbled upon evidence that Alex Tarasenko’s report on President Kennedy’s assassination is not just an urban legend. Olivia chooses to die early in the novel rather than revealing her evidence to killers employed by a “secret organization of orthodox, ultraconservative Catholics in the US, intent on bringing about what they have designated the ‘Next America’.” The organization is known as the Movement.

Before she died, Heller sent history professor and Jesuit brother Juan Verdugo a video message that sends Verdugo on a quest to recover the Tarasenko dossier. For reasons that can only be explained as plot drivers (if the events didn’t happen, there would be no plot), Tarasenko encrypted a series of clues, leading Verdugo on a treasure hunt to find the hidden materials.

Olivia was shagging Tarasenko back in the day, but a year before her death, she was shagging Mingus. When Mingus learned of Olivia’s death, he assumed she was murdered. In search of vengeance, he goes to Olivia’s townhouse, hoping to find information that will lead him to her killer. There he discovers Verdugo, who — in response to a text message Olivia sent minutes before her death — is retrieving a book he loaned to Olivia. Mingus soon receives a text that Olivia had arranged to be sent after her death. The text asks him to protect Verdugo.

The quest begins in Washington D.C., where Mingus and Verdugo must steal an old cipher machine that Tarasenko used in the 1960s to encrypt his clues. The plot sends Mingus and Verdugo to Dallas, New Orleans, and Mexico City as they solve riddles that lead them to the next clue The novel’s final chapters provide a barely plausible explanation for the treasure hunt, so I’m not going to trash Hauty for structuring the story around it, despite my inability to buy into the plot.

I think it was Chekov who said that if an action hero gives a shooting lesson to a priest in act one, the priest will shoot someone in act three. Enough said about that.

I credit Hauty for his painstaking research. The novel is soaked in details about the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories to which it gave birth. That lore, real or imagined, is at least as interesting as Mingus’ attempt to find the truth.

The final reveal is so far over the top that I also give Hauty credit for having the audacity to go there. I don’t know the true facts surrounding the Kennedy assassination, but Hauty’s version won’t pass anyone’s plausibility test, notwithstanding his ability to weave the threads of history into a new design. Does that matter? The more a story entertains me, the less concerned I am about plausibility. The balance in Dead Ringer weighs more on the entertainment side of the scale.

The aftermath of the reveal imagines a better America — a path forward, toward democracy and away from those who try to subvert it. Nice to imagine — and I can’t fault a happy ending — but the aftermath might be even less plausible than the reveal. The movement that Mingus works to overcome doesn’t compare to the movement that, for the moment, holds the nation in a death grip.

Mingus doesn’t have much personality but he has enough to serve the ends of the story. Verdugo is true to his Jesuit calling. The bad guys are typical masters of the universe, apart from a religiously motivated assassin who gives religion a bad name. The assassin overcomes a surprising number of wounds but keeps on killing. While he is yet another implausible element in the novel, the story delivers sufficient action to please thriller fans and is sufficiently nutty to engage the attention on conspiracy theorists.

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