The Mediator by Robert Bailey

Published by Thomas & Mercer on May 12, 2026

When Maxine (“Max”) Ringo thinks to herself This can’t be happening, I thought, You’re right about that. Robert Bailey tells such an implausible story that I never persuaded myself to suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoying it.

The Mediator is set in Huntsville. Max is a lawyer whose law license was suspended. She’s beginning a new career as a mediator. In scenes that become tedious because of their repetition, Max beats herself up for ruining her life. She became addicted to oxy after she was in a traffic accident, then started stealing to fund her habit after her doctor cut her off, then started taking meth before her law firm fired her. After a stint in rehab, she’s earning money by mediating cases until her license is reinstated.

A judge who used to be her good friend assigns Max to mediate a divorce. The divorcing spouses are wealthy and their families are financially intertwined. The husband, Perry Strassburg, is CEO and 30% owner of Richardson Concepts. The company was founded by his father-in-law, Dagger Richardson, who also owns 30%. Perry’s wife, Stephanie Richardson, owns the remaining 40%.

Perry wants to acquire full ownership of the company for nefarious reasons. The company’s value grew substantially after Perry became CEO. Perry is willing to buy out Dagger’s interest but Dagger isn’t interested in selling. Stephanie has made clear that she won’t make a divorce settlement that her father opposes.

To obtain a favorable settlement, Perry has orchestrated Max’s appointment as mediator. He’s also kidnapped her son. He shows Max a live video of her son as he’s tied up in a barn. Max’s son is a meth addict and isn’t doing well in his withdrawal. For reasons that make no sense, Perry believes Max can force Stephanie and her father to relinquish their interest in the company. If she doesn’t, he will kill Max’s son. And he needs to gain control of the company within the next two days because a bank is threatening to call in his loans.

Perry’s scheme is nonsensical. A mediator isn’t a judge. A mediator can’t force anything to happen. And Dagger isn’t a party to the divorce so his share of the company isn’t a marital asset that the divorce court can touch. Perry’s belief that his scheme has a prayer of success is ridiculous.

That Max goes along with Perry’s scheme is just as unbelievable. She has ample time to plant a microphone, or even record Perry on her cellphone saying things like “It was nothing to me to kidnap your son, and I won’t hesitate to end his miserable life.” Perry makes multiple threats across two days. Max only needs to record one of them to get herself out of her predicament and save her son’s life. Her failure to take such an obvious step cemented my inability to buy into the plot.

Max instead turns to an old friend who introduces her to a tough guy named Satch Tonidandel. In Thrillerworld, tough guys are the answer to every problem. It takes some time for Satch to spring into action, but experienced thriller readers know that a tough guy with a military background isn’t introduced into the plot for no reason. In a trite “a mother will do anything for her son” moment, Max also turns into an action hero as the story nears its climax. Modern thrillers rarely tell a credible story, but this one is more over the top than most.

Bailey gives his characters too little personality. Max spends most of her time beating herself up for her addiction. Perry and Dagger are stereotypes of greedy businessmen. Satch is a standard aging tough guy. Max’s son is trying to decide whether he’s gay, an attempt at characterization that disappears almost immediately after it’s introduced into the plot.

Stephanie has a spreading form of cancer that is now incurable. She’s trying to decide whether to stop treatment. Scenes of women hugging and crying together ensue. Some readers will be more moved by those heavy-handed scenes than I was. Like Max’s recovery from addiction, the cancer seems like a substitute for deeper characterization, an easy way to make the reader sympathize with the characters.

Bailey repeatedly relies on clichéd phrases: “She looked like death warmed over.”  “Time to unleash hell.” Some chapters end with mini-cliffhangers, sentences like: “She peeked out her door and could barely believe her eyes.” Writers always try to manipulate readers, but they only succeed by being subtle. Such an obvious attempt to force readers to turn the page might cause some readers to think “this is a real page turner,” but many other readers are likely to resent such obvious manipulation.

The novel does have a few surprising twists at the end, so it isn’t a total loss for mystery fans. It also moves quickly, so it isn’t a tedious read. That’s such faint praise that I can’t give The Mediator a full recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Last Flight from Moscow by Andie Newton

First published by HarperCollins in Great Britain in 2026; published by One More Chapter on May 7, 2026

The Last Flight from Moscow is a flawed spy novel set in 1959. The story is narrated by Mae Pierce, a 34-year-old woman who spied for OSS during World War II. Her former partner in espionage, Sutton Maxfield, now works for the CIA.

While in the OSS, Mae was captured by the Germans. Sutton rescued her with an assist from Vera, a Russian spy. That anecdote is at the heart of the novel’s theme, which amounts to “no woman left behind.”

Sutton has long been retired. She seems to have had trouble adjusting to conventional life. She plays the numbers, relying on a supposed ability to forsee the winning numbers in advance. Her winnings are sporadic and she's deeply in debt to a criminal organization that will do her harm if she doesn't pay.

With that setup, the rest of the story follows a predictable path. Sutton recruits Mae to travel to Moscow to perform a mission, promising to pay her enough to erase her debt. The US is showcasing the American way of life by building a modern home in Moscow, complete with miracle appliances. The Americans are providing guides (actually models) to demonstrate how dutiful American wives operate fancy stoves.

The mission is to save Khruschev. The CIA has tumbled onto a scheme to assassinate him when he attends the exhibition. Sutton wants Mae and a young “girl spy,” Elaine Holiday, to pose as exhibition guides and keep an eye out for clues to the assassin’s identity. Lacking confidence in girl spies, the CIA has assigned male agents (posing as electricians and such) to do the heavy lifting. Mae and Elaine will be supervised in Russia by CIA Agent Hayden Quaid. 

Sutton asks Mae to train Elaine, although Mae provides little in the way of training as the story progresses. In fact, it wasn’t clear to me that Mae had any training of her own, apart from being told not to be photographed while spying.

In Moscow, Mae discovers that Vera is a chaperone at the exhibition. Vera was a Stalinist when they joined forces to fight the Germans but she might now be working for Khruschev or the Russian mafia. Whether Vera is still loyal to her buddies in the OSS or is now a villain should probably be a key plot point, but Andie Newton’s clumsy handling of the question robs it of any interest. Newton attempts to misdirect the reader as to both Vera's loyalty and the assassin's identity but the reveals are far from surpising. 

We know from history that Khrushchev was not assassinated, but the plot suggests that he would have been ridiculously easy to kill, but for the intervention of the CIA. The assassination plot wraps up with about a third of the novel remaining. Mae returns to the US but Elaine doesn’t.

The rest of the story involves Mae's determination not to leave Elaine behind. Mae's rescue plan depends on her haphazard ability to see numbers before they are revealed. I’m not sure that witchcraft has any place in a serious spy novel, but The Last Flight from Moscow doesn’t tell a serious story.

Mae is addicted to vodka, gambling, and sex, making her a more modern woman than the other guides, including Darla, who proudly represents Pepsi in its efforts to break into the Russian soft drink market. Like Linda Lou and Suzanne and Karen and the other American women, Darla is built on a stereotype. The women show little that might count as believable personalities.

Newton failed to convince me that the book tells a plausible story. Mae repeatedly sneaks out at night, breaking curfew and crossing boundaries into the forbidden parts of Moscow. The American embassy notices but the Russians never seem to spot her. For a seasoned spy, Mae’s tradecraft is nearly nonexistent. She has sensitive conversations with Elaine in their hotel rooms, apparently unaware that well before the 1950s, Russians began bugging hotel rooms where Americans stayed. Yet the Russians never tumble to the fact that Mae is a spy.

There are too many scenes in which Mae describes the butterflies in her stomach when she sees the “dreamy” Quaid, or imagines bedding him before she actually does. Having sex and falling in love with the wrong person is a staple of spy fiction, but dreamy men giving rise to butterflied stomachs is in a different category altogether. Infecting a spy novel with the tropes of a romance novel might be a good formula for fans of romance fiction, so you might like The Last Flight from Moscow if that’s what you’re looking for. Be prepared for dialog like “Shut up and kiss me, damn it.” I was annoyed by those scenes, although I admired Mae’s progressive (for pre-feminist times) approach to coping with horniness.

Mae spends more time obsessing about her Japanese nightgown (she loans it to another model in exchange for a favor) than she devotes to catching the assassin. There are far too many scenes of women discussing fashion, complete with detailed descriptions of hairstyles and shoes. Fashion-conscious readers who wonder what women were wearing in 1959 might be thrilled by this content. I thought it was boring filler that serves only to increase the word count.

In fact, the entire novel is too boring to qualify as a thriller. Nor does it develop the kind of intrigue I desire from a spy novel. Some readers will appreciate the novel’s message of female empowerment in pre-feminist times. To those readers, I give the novel a guarded recommendation. For other spy novel fans, there are better choices on the market.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Five by Ilona Bannister

Published by Crown on May 5, 2026

Five is the number of characters who might die before the novel Five ends. We know someone will die because Ilona Bannister tells us that in the novel’s early pages. Bannister describes the potential dead as “the child, the mother, the businessman, the old woman, and the gambler.” We know them as Gideon, Emma, Liam, Mrs. Worth, and Sonny.

The plot is organized around those characters as they converge in a subway station. Some are on the track as a delayed train begins to approach. One has decided to commit suicide. A character who remains on the platform is having a heart attack. The child is balance-walking along the lip of the platform as the train approaches. Their fates unfold in minutes, but the death drama is broken up by backstories that take the reader on a journey through each life, from infancy to the present.

Gideon is the child from hell. He never bonded with his mother Emma. He disobeys her, hits her with her high heel shoe, booby traps the cupboard so a rolling pin will fall on her when she opens it. Child psychologists have done nothing to improve his behavior. Nannies have quit, the most recent one after Gideon crapped in her shoes. When Gideon, having escaped Emma’s grasp, almost falls onto the subway tracks, she briefly considers not catching him.

If Gideon is the child from hell, Mrs. Worth might be the mother from hell. Not her fault, really, given her own motherless childhood. Mrs. Worth (she hates the name Matilda) was raised by a father who was a surgeon in the war until the atrocities he observed caused him to lose his grip. As a child, Matilda’s father taught her how to dissect dead animals, some of which (including the neighbor’s dog) he kills for that purpose. Mrs. Worth, now a pathologist, is distant from her own son (conceived by one of the lovers whose sexual performance she charted in her lab notes), a distance that grew when she realized she was turning into her father.

Sonny was another bad kid, in the sense that he’s hyperactive and has no use for rules that are meant to restrain him. By the time he reaches the subway platform in his late twenties, Sonny has a serious gambling addiction and has given up on himself. He understands that he doesn’t “fit into a world that was not built for people like him.”

Sonny was in nursery school when his father died. His mother Luna, beside herself with grief, can’t take Sonny out in public for fear that his misbehavior will annoy others. In challenging Sonny’s teachers to be less boring. Luna won’t admit that her son has any problems of his own making because doing so would cause her to blame herself for not raising him properly.

Liam grew up in a poor family with a disabled brother and devoted mother. Liam and his brother Danny overcame hardships, grew a business, and hired Emma as their CFO. Liam marries a woman and stays with her until she becomes “a bit old and puffy.” While he is with his third wife, Emma decides he would be a perfect sperm donor. But Liam’s story is less about Emma and more about the damage he does to his relationship with his brother because he fears he will lose Danny to the caregiver Danny loves.

So will one of them really die? Ilona Bannister telegraphs the outcome well before it arrives: “There is no open-ended scene where you are left guessing if perhaps everyone survives in the end and the story is just a comment on the fragility of the human condition and the diversity of human suffering: a clever mechanism to remind us that everyone has a story, and not everyone is who or what they seem.” But that’s exactly what the novel is, regardless of the outcome. Five people with complex histories are together in a moment that will shape the rest of four lives and end the fifth.

Bannister assumes that readers will pick a favorite character for an early grave and will root for others to survive. She then challenges the reader to ask why one character is “worthy of surviving in the internal universe of your brain” while another is not. The novel’s brilliance lies in that philosophical inquiry.

Motherhood is a theme that ties the stories together. Even when mothers do their best, they are blamed for the sins of their children. Mothers, “even if they were good mothers, even if they had sacrificed for and loved their boys, even if they had given them good homes, were still and always would be the bad mothers of terrible sons.”

Bannister plays with the novel’s form, occasionally using her narrative voice to speak directly to the reader, as when she explains to readers that they might view surviving characters as having metaphorically died in part, “if you like those kinds of metaphors. Metaphors about life and death, or the death of the spirit versus the death of the body, or the death of the past to enable the birth of the future, these are always good topics to raise in book club when the conversation lags.” Because talking about metaphors is easier than talking about why we wanted a particular character to die. I’m not usually a fan of an author’s intrusion into the narrative, but Bannister guides the reader to lessons that are too important to miss.

The story is sad but life-affirming. Do you deserve a better fate than her characters, Bannister asks. It doesn’t matter what we think we deserve. We all live for a time, experiencing moments of pain and moments of joy before we inevitably die. An author can decide which character will die but, in life, those choices seem random. All we can know is that “life and death happen because they do.” At the same time, Five is a testament to “how extraordinary ordinary people are.”

Five delivers the tension of a thriller and the deep character development of a literary novel. Bannister’s prose is precise in its depiction of human nature. She is brutal in her honest observation of human failings but compassionate in her understanding of human weaknesses. Five is the best novel I’ve read in 2026 and may be the best novel I’ll read this year.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Teacher by Tim Sullivan

First published in Great Britain in 2024; published by Atlantic Crime on May 5, 2026

George Cross is among the most entertaining protagonists in the modern world of crime novels. He suffers from Autism Spectrum Condition (he used to call it Asperger’s Syndrome but he’s changed his preference). Perhaps his co-workers suffer more than George, because he fails to recognize social cues and is thus unintentionally rude to everyone. When people get to know him (as readers quickly do), they realize that he makes the best of what he’s got, and what he’s got is focus and tenacity. When George locks onto an unsolved murder, his mind doesn’t rest until he’s found the solution. But what George doesn’t have is ill will. He simply wants the truth to come out and can’t understand why anyone else would have a different agenda.

The Teacher develops George and surrounding characters a bit less than earlier Cross novels. To the extent that Tim Sullivan adds to his well-developed characters, family plays a strong role in the novel. Mothers are particularly important. A subplot involves as the mother of George’s work partner, DS Josie Ottey, who now lives with Josie in one of those uncomfortable adult mother-daughter relationships.

George’s mother is back in his life. Her husband has recently died and she’s hanging out with George’s father, the most stable element of George’s universe. His father accepts him for who he is and keeps him anchored. George is starting to fret about how he will survive when his father passes, a worry that humanizes George and helps the reader appreciate that, whatever his condition might be called, he is still a human who deserves empathy and understanding.

The plot follows a formula that serves mystery writers well. It starts with a murder. Alistair Moreton has been stabbed in the heart with a chisel. His German Shepard mourns his master’s death, although that may be the only creature who will miss Alistair.

The story then introduces a number of plausible suspects, starting with a next-door neighbor, Barnaby Cotterell, who shared a driveway with Alistair and was hot-headed about Alistair’s maintenance of the hedges. But Alistair used to be a sadistic headmaster and there is no shortage of former students who have vowed to see him in his grave. Some resent him for making his son the head boy. The son, Sandy Moreton, is now a member of parliament, although another of Alistair’s students, Richard Brook, got Sandy recalled for bullying his staff. Like father, like son, it seems.

It turns out that Alistair developed a drug addiction after he had hip surgery. When his doctor wouldn’t prescribe more narcotics, he found a supplier. Two men then moved into his house, keeping him high with their supply while they used his residence as a base for their drug distribution. And then there’s Malcolm Fisk, who once accused Alistair of kidnapping his daughter. They are among the many suspects Cross interrogates as he tries to identify the killer.

A new detective, DI Bobby Warner, is filling in from another jurisdiction. He quickly settles on Cotterell as the killer and devotes his time to proving his theory is correct, a common method of police work that leads to the conviction of innocent people. The method is anathema to Cross, who soon finds himself at odds with Warner.

Warner is also at odds with police staffer Alice Mackenzie, an attractive young woman who doesn’t appreciate Warner’s aggressive sexual interest. Men who don’t know how to behave with women and the institutional protection they enjoy is a recurring theme in the story.

It’s no surprise but immensely satisfying when Cross proves that Warner’s theory is unsound. Alice is a bit more physical in teaching Warner a lesson. Cross finds the killer by turning his obsessive attention to the clues until he pieces them together in a new way. He’s assisted by the efforts of forensic investigator Michael Swift, who fancies himself a Watson to Cross’ Holmes. Several dogs enter the story and Swift’s ability to identify the dogs helps Cross identify the killer.

In book after book, Tim Sullivan delivers all the elements of a classic whodunit. I love the series, however, for Sullivan’s ability to create likeable characters while reminding readers that compassion and understanding are essential components of a meaningful life.

RECOMMENDED

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

Published by Scribner on April 28, 2026

“When you’re thirteen, you don’t know what to think or who to believe.” Ghost Town is the sad coming-of-age story of a 13-year-old whose mother has just died. Adults assure him that his mother is in heaven but “it felt fake — too good to be true — like a story adults had invented to make children feel better and ended up believing themselves.”

The story lives in the memory of Jimmy Perrini, who thinks back to a fateful summer in 1974. One of Jimmy’s teachers is a far-right bigot whose brother died in Vietnam. He won’t tolerate any dissent about the war and has no use for hippies or nonwhite people in Creamwood, New Jersey. Jimmy has no experience with people of color until Wayne, his hippie cousin, moves into the house next door with his mixed wife Nilda and her Black cousin Hector.

Intermittent returns to 2024 reveal that Jimmy is now best known as Jay Perry, an author who was experiencing declining sales for his literary novels before writing a successful YA series that turned into an even more successful television show for kids. With some trepidation, he returns to Creamwood to attend an event honoring his father. He makes the trip because he is tired of denying the past. “It felt like I was finally ready to face up to it, to reclaim those missing years, the world I’d left behind.” He is surprised by how racially diverse the town has become in his absence.

The 1974 story gets moving after Jimmy becomes overwhelmed after hearing his mother’s voice at her funeral. As he flees from the funeral home, Eddie Fitzpatrick pulls up in his Chevy Vega and offers Jimmy a ride. A bit younger than Jimmy’s sister Denise, Eddie does little that summer except smoke pot and cruise the streets, occasionally making unsuccessful attempts to impress girls.

Jimmy and Eddie begin to cruise the town regularly, always in the evening, and Jimmy eventually accepts Eddie’s offer to take some hits from his joints. Jimmy enjoys being high and indulges regularly after that first experience. Jimmy adopts a routine of riding with Eddie until he concludes that the Vega is haunted by the ghost of its original owner.

Jimmy knows his mother would have grounded him “for the rest of his life if she’d found out that he was smoking pot with a high school kid and staying out way past his curfew. But that was the thing— she wasn’t alive anymore and the rules were different now.” His father is a firefighter who, lost in his own world after his wife’s death, never keeps his promises to spend more time with Jimmy and devotes little effort to supervising him.

Jimmy has a not-quite girlfriend named Janie, but while he was away from school in the week after his mother’s death, Janie began to date his best friend Greg. When Janie’s family leaves for the summer, her friend Olivia offers to use her Ouija board to help Jimmy communicate with his mother. They make contact with a spirit (or so it seems to Jimmy) but it isn’t Jimmy’s mother. A later Ouija board sessions summons still a different ghost.

Although Olivia is two years older and six inches taller than Jimmy, she quickly inspires him to forget about Janie. A fleeting sexual experience — Jimmy’s first of any significance — enlivens the plot until he hears his mother’s voice, causing him to flee from Olivia just as he fled from his mother’s funeral. Whether the admonishing voice comes from Jimmy’s dead mother or his conscience is for the reader to decide, as is the real or imagined appearance of his mother’s ghost as the story nears its end. Jimmy might not believe in heaven, but he comes to believe in the enduring power of his mother’s love.

In addition to its flirtation with the spirit world, race relations are a dominant theme. Creamwood is a white community and many of its residents want it to stay that way. Eddie’s pot dealer, a loser who has no moral authority to judge anyone else, is one of those. He is particularly antagonistic to Hector, despite Hector’s generous nature and friendly demeanor. That animosity appears to play a role in the novel’s defining moment.

Ghost Town is a low-key novel that underplays its climax. It always seems that the story will lead to an eventful moment (because that’s what coming-of-age stories do), but it isn’t clear what that moment will be until it happens. The life-changing event is dramatic, but the reader learns little of its immediate impact on Jimmy because he repressed the memory. In the novel’s final pages, having returned to Creamwood fifty years later, Jimmy finally makes sense of it as best he can.

Like the movie American Graffiti, Ghost Town creates a sense of nostalgia for a lost time, a youthful summer of cars and shifting friendships and doomed love. Ghost Town takes a darker tone, however, in its depiction of Creamwood as a community that is hostile to social progress. Some of this understandably goes over the head of 13-year-old Jimmy, while the adult version of himself is pleased that small-minded residents of his childhood home could not stand in the way of progressive change.

Ghost Town evokes a mixture of sweet and sad emotions. Still, it doesn’t stand apart from other coming-of-age novels that have covered the same ground. Perrotta pushes all the right buttons, but I can’t say that he achieves anything new or particularly memorable. The appearance of Jimmy's mother's ghost at the novel's end is a bit sappy, although plenty of readers will appreciate the sap. The novel has enough strong moments to earn a recommendation, but its familiarity robs it of emotional resonance.

RECOMMENDED