The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel

Published by Tordotcom on February 17, 2026

The Rainseekers is a lovely novella about the first humans to feel rain on Mars. Humanity has survived “the Great Insect Collapse and the Climate Wars that followed.” Mars has been colonized and is in the process of being terraformed. Some places have pockets of breathable air. Weather scientists have predicted the first rainfall will occur in one such pocket. A group of colonists want to be there when it happens.

The story is narrated by Sakunja Salazar. Sakunja gained a social media following by sharing her grievances against her mother in the way that Eminem became famous by griping about his parents. Sakunja’s mother discouraged her social media efforts until she started to make money, then flipped out when Sakunja read On the Road and decided to abandon her fanbase to tour the solar system. For the last seven years, Sakunja has resided on Mars, where she indulges in “unhealthy binge drinking, drug abuse, periods of depression, and self-inflicted sleep deprivation.”

Sakunja works as a photographer but has taken an assignment from Ares magazine to tell the stories of the Martian colonists who hope to feel the first rainfall on Mars. Sakunja describes the novella’s theme in its early pages: “every soul has a story worth telling. All we have to do is just shut up and listen.” A related theme lies in Sakunja’s realization that, despite her “all-pervading sense of my unimportance,” her “life isn’t worthless. There is meaning, however small, to my existence.”

The novella is short and the interviews that Sakunja conducts are few, but the subjects tell compelling stories that share certain elements, including the importance of education and how our choices shape our future. Ghleanna Watanabe is the great-great-granddaughter of a Nigerian whose family discouraged his curiosity, urging him to work harder in the fields and to set aside his dreams. A kind man realized the potential of Gleanna’s ancestor and made it possible for him to pursue an education, allowing him to make discoveries that are vital to the Mars colony. The lesson Ghleanna draws from her ancestor’s life is that “we’re a fraught species. We murder and kill and lie and cheat and eat babies for breakfast. But every so often, despite our immeasurable stupidity, we do beautiful things.”

Jivanta Tanaka-Halevi was born on Mars. Her brittle bones would make it impossible for her to survive in Earth’s gravity. Her mother was a Japanese molecular bioscientist. Her father “was raised inside the Satmar sect of Hasidism” and sheltered from the outside world until a fire literally burned down the walls that surrounded him. Like Ghleanna’s ancestor, Jivanta’s father discovered the wonders of an education that freed him from the confining beliefs of his parents.

Two other characters view Mars as offering a second chance. Douglas Charles Baxter Jr. is the child of meth addicts. “He, like all of us thrust confused and alone into the world, has been swept along the brisk currents of life, grasping for handholds, for connection, while constantly being torn from everything he’s ever loved.” Shabnan Naderi was born in Iran, grew up in France, dropped out of school at the urging of a disastrous boyfriend-turned-husband, and served seventeen years in prison before venturing to Mars. Both characters confront misfortune but strive to be better people.

The individual stories are each inspiring in their own ways. The journey to find rain is dangerous and not all the travelers will survive. While the journey thus provides the elements of a science fiction adventure story, the plot primarily serves as a framework for the stories that Sakunja gathers. The novella’s larger point is the commonality of existence. Each of the disparate characters has overcome hardships; each is willing to endure more of them to experience the joy of being among the first humans to see rain on Mars.

The pleasure of reading Matthew Kressel’s graceful prose made me wish Sakunja had told the stories of each of her fellow travelers. Leaving the reader wanting more is the sign of a good storyteller. The novella might not appeal to science fiction fans who think sf should only be about clever humans defeating warrior aliens, but it might appeal to readers who don’t usually turn to sf but appreciate life-affirming stories about people who gain the courage to take risks and make choices that will change their destinies.

RECOMMENDED

The Hard Line by Mark Greaney

Published by Berkley on February 17, 2026

In the delightfully over-the-top Midnight Black, Court Gentry needs to get smuggled into Russia so he can rescue Zoya Zakharova from prison. An early action scene in that novel has Gentry in Bulgaria, where his attempt to arrange transportation into Russia goes awry. Gentry kills a bunch of criminals and seriously wounds a hired bodyguard.

Early in The Hard Line, that scene is replayed, this time focusing on the bodyguard, an Irish lad named Charlie Coyle. A few days after Gentry shoots him, Coyle dies from an infection in a Bulgarian hospital. Diedre, Coyle’s wife, delivers that news to Charlie Coyle’s father, Campbell Coyle, who is living in Ireland under an alias.

Campbell was a “bad man with a dark history, and he came from a long line of men with dark histories.” Dierdre blames Campbell for her husband’s death because Charlie, despite being a good man, wanted to be like his father. Campbell blames himself for the same reason.

From the moment he hears the news, Campbell — formerly an assassin-for-hire — makes it his mission to murder the man who killed his son. Campbell is motivated not so much by revenge, but by his desire to assure that his grandson doesn’t get killed while seeking vengeance against his father’s killer.

Gentry has made enemies of almost everyone during the course of the Gray Man novels. Add Campbell to a list that also includes Scott Kincaid, code name Lancer, a “former Navy SEAL turned assassin” who correctly blames Gentry for his confinement in a Cuban prison. Kincaid gets his shot at vengeance in The Hard Line, but he’ll have to find Gentry before Campbell can reach him.

Coyle and Kincaid are among the killers who have been hired by Marcus Maragos, a broker of assassins. Their targets are members of (or affiliated with) the intelligence community. The killers are teamed with support agents from the Gauntlet Group, one of those businesses that make money by renting mercenaries to governments that want to kill people without taking responsibility for the deaths.

Gentry is settling into his role as an operative for a new off-the-books group managed by Matt Hanley. Gentry’s first mission is to extract a CIA asset from Nicaragua whose cover has been burned. While he’s in that country, Gentry learns that China is “working with Nicaraguan intelligence and a Central American drug gang, and clearly involved in a kinetic operation to kill CIA assets.” Exactly who is masterminding that operation in the US, and why recent CIA missions have been compromised, is for Gentry (and the reader) to discover as the novel progresses.

Mark Greaney’s smooth prose contributes to some of the best action scenes in the subgenre of tough guy thrillers. The story is genuinely exciting. Greaney earns extra credit, however, for character development. The most interesting chapter relates a telephone conversation between Gentry and Campbell. As Campbell explains why he needs to kill Gentry, they discuss their family members who lived productive, law-abiding lives and ponder why their isolated lives turned out as they did. Campbell opines that some of their bloodlines are “soft” in a good way, but “You and me. We’re from the hard lines.” Gentry suggests that they could both have chosen different lives, but it isn’t clear that he believes his own argument.

Greaney also explores family and isolation from the perspective of Zach Hightower, whose ex-wife and daughter are in witness protection in Boulder. Zach has tracked them down and, while rehabbing from his injuries, makes daily visits to the coffee shop where his daughter works. The daughter has no idea that Zach is her father. The shop owner wonders if he is a stalker, given the interest he seems to be taking in a teenage barista, while Zach wonders about the life he could have had if he had not chosen one of violence.

Having introduced Zach’s daughter into the story, savvy thriller fans will expect her to be endangered by the bad guys at some point. Those fans will not be disappointed.

To keep the family theme flowing, Gentry needs to convince his dad to shelter somewhere other than Florida so Campbell can’t use him as leverage. Since Gentry hasn’t talked to his father in twenty years, their reunion is touching in a subtle way. Neither Gentry nor his dad are touchy-feely — his dad taught Gentry to shoot and has retained some marksmanship skill that he will eventually put to use in an action scene — but Gentry’s time with his father provides insight into the evolution of a tough guy action hero.

The story’s resolution is enjoyable. Even without the bonus of character development, I would recommend The Hard Line as an action novel. Because it is more than an action novel, I can recommend The Hard Line as one of the best entries in one of the best series in the realm of tough guy fiction.

RECOMMENDED

Antihero by Gregg Hurwitz

Published by Minotaur Books on February 10, 2025

Having defeated the program that made Evan Smoak into a killing machine before his creators tried to kill him, Evan now helps the helpless. At some point in Antihero, a teenage girl who sent a revealing selfie to a jerk calls Evan for help because the jerk is threatening to post the selfie for her peers to see unless she gives him more. Reporting the blackmail scheme to the police would be a civilized approach to the jerk’s behavior, but Evan decides the jerk should be frightened into better behavior. At least the jerk survives the encounter, unlike some of the criminals Evan confronts.

Antihero opens with a one-against-five street fight that allows Evan to prove his tough guy bona fides to the reader. Having established Evan’s tough guy credentials, Gregg Hurwitz dives into the primary plot thread. Anca Dumitrescu, a 25-year-old employee of a Romanian Orthodox Church in the Bronx, suffers from daily seizures. When she feels a seizure coming on, Anca implores a bystander (chosen in order of probable decency) to watch over her for a few minutes until she recovers.

Anca has a seizure on the subway. She tries to get help from the only available passenger — a woman named Monica — but Monica wants to catch a helicopter and can’t take time to stay with Anca. As Monica leaves the subway, she notices four young men approaching Anca and knows that can’t be good.

The helicopter takes Monica to a powerful man named Luke Devine — the kind of man who knows everything about everyone of importance, in part because he has them all under electronic surveillance. Devine intended to shag Monica but she’s too upset, so he calls Evan — an odd choice, since Evan’s ability to deal with upset women is negligible. When Monica tells Evan about Anca, Evan has his sidekick, Josephine Morales, use her computer skills, combined with Devine’s surveillance network, to search for her.

By the time Evan finds the apartment where Anca was gang-raped by the four men, Anca has made it home. Evan decides to track down the rapists by confronting the guy who rented them the room, but after discovering that they filmed the rape, he decides to go after the purveyors of violent porn. The relatively straightforward story follows Evan as (with the help of Devine’s wealth and gadgetry) he takes on the porn industry and the various bad actors who cross his path.

Hurwitz writes strong action scenes, but the story he tells in Antihero is nothing special. Violent gang members and rapists and purveyors of violent porn are the kind of easy targets that readers of tough guy novels are accustomed to encountering. The fast pace and exciting action scenes would be enough to earn a recommendation despite the superficial plot, but I’m giving a strong recommendation to Antihero because its characterization moves beyond the superficial.

Like a lot of tough guy protagonists, Evan is fairly quick to judge people and to kill the ones who, in his judgment, deserve to die. If they don’t deserve to die but, in his judgment, deserve harsh punishment, Evan administers pain and inflicts injuries in the precise degrees that, in his judgment, the evildoers deserve. Too rarely do tough guy protagonists consider the morality of their actions or the societal consequences of allowing tough guys to supplant the criminal justice system in meeting out punishment. Authors of tough guy novels avoid those hard questions by removing ambiguity about the villain’s evil nature, assuring the reader’s sympathy for victims of the villain’s misdeeds. Readers can easily greet the absence of due process with a shrug that signals “he deserved it.”

In Antihero, Hurwitz forces Evan to at least contemplate the possibility that he has no right to torture or execute people. Anca — one of the best characters Hurwitz has created — is informed by her religion. She admonishes Evan not to kill the men who raped and filmed her because she believes that judgment comes from a higher power, not from tough guys. It isn’t rare for victims to feel this way — many people have opposed the death penalty for defendants who murdered their family members — but it’s rare for thriller writers to acknowledge moral complexity.

I give credit to Hurwitz for introducing a victim who has the courage to tell Evan that she refuses to allow him to kill in her name. Mind you, Evan still busts up the characters in Antihero he regards as evil (he seals one in a giant plastic bag), but Evan is at least influenced by the argument that it isn’t his business to seek vengeance for a victim who doesn’t believe in vengeance. Realizing that he might be turning into a monster, Evan gives more thought to the morality of vengeance than is common for an action hero tough guy. The Nowhere Man doesn’t quite grow a conscience by the novel’s end, but he forces himself to acknowledge the potential validity of Anca’s perspective.

Hurwitz also shapes the evolution of Evan’s character by forcing him to confront his fear that Josephine, when no longer under his wing, will endure the kind of pain and harm that he sees in the victims he helps. Evan isn’t Joey’s father, but he is facing the hard choices that parents make between protecting their kids from harm and being so overprotective that they deny their kids the opportunity to become independent. Hurwitz’s deft handling of Even’s character development earns a stronger recommendation than I might otherwise give Antihero.

RECOMMENDED

The Hadacol Boogie by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Crime on February 10, 2026

Supernatural events have been part of the Robicheaux universe for more than thirty years. While I’m not usually a fan of supernatural fiction, I understand the temptation of crime writers to explain evil by suggesting its origin in the depths of hell. I always admire James Lee Burke’s prose and enjoy his storytelling, but his resort to the supernatural in The Hadacol Boogie gives me the sense that I’ve read the novel before.

The novel is set at “the end of the twentieth century.” Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell are Vietnam veterans who have been shaped by the horrors of that war. Shortly after the novel opens, kids in a boat see a tall ugly man whose hair seems to be made of sticks dragging a garbage bag across Dave’s property. Dave finds the bag and opens it to discover the lifeless body of a young black woman, a guitar string embedded in her throat.

Dave suspects that a handyman left the body on his property but does not attribute the woman’s death to him. The handyman, Boone Hendrix, claims to see dead people walking, but this is nothing new to Dave and Clete. Clete believes he communes with Joan of Arc, so Hendrix is no crazier than Dave’s best friend. Whether Hendrix calls upon supernatural powers to kill bad guys is an open question by the novel’s end.

The dead woman is Clemmie Benoit, who shares a last name with Dave’s new deputy sheriff, Valerie Benoit. For reasons that are never clear or convincing, Valerie is cagey about her relationship with Clemmie. Dave’s daughter Alafair knew Clemmy when they were both members of an amateur acting group, but she also seems reluctant to discuss their friendship. Their acquaintance foreshadows the danger that Alafair will eventually face as Dave tries to track down the killer. Valerie, in the meantime, is searching for Civil War artifacts, a fact that improbably plays into the larger story. None of these plot elements made much sense to me.

The surprisingly convoluted plot involves Jerry Carlucci, the owner of “a ramshackle saloon and brothel and café at the bottom of a levee a short distance from the saltwater that was eating away the Louisiana coast.” Jerry’s plan to develop casinos may be responsible for bringing the mob to the area. Another potential suspect is Elton Foot, who gets into a tussle with Clete that doesn’t end well for Elton. Also involved with Carlucci is Tommy Driscoll, who tells Clete he tried to get Clemmie off drugs after shutting down the trailer that a former owner of his bar had been using as a house of prostitution.

Some plot elements are puzzling and the ending is a bit predictable, but The Hadacol Boogie has other merits. I appreciate the way Burke expresses ideas, even when many others have expressed the same ideas in less elegant ways. For example: “Maybe she had found herself. You know what I mean? Three or four people are running around inside you, then one day you forgive yourself for your frailties and mistakes, and accept the world for the fine place it is and go about your way.”

Burke refuses to join the (mostly) southern movement to rewrite or whitewash southern history. Dave suggests that nobody else remembers the fourteen-year-old black kid who was electrocuted twice because the drunken executioner botched the first try. Dave will never forget. He remarks that “the past seemed stamped every place I looked.” He sees the slaves hanging from trees. He sees the cops who drop a gun on an unarmed corpse to justify the killing. Dave has no patience with people who cannot learn from the past, who “seem best at banning or burning what they can’t understand.”

Dave has a love/hate relationship with Louisiana that adds complexity to his character. He has spent most of his life in New Iberia, a community that feels like home. He loves the cuisine and lifestyle, but he is clear-eyed about the state as a whole, including its corruption and “long history with the Mafia”:

You well know that your beloved Louisiana is a haunted place and will never give you rest. Why is that? It’s because the enslaved have no tombstones, most not even coffins.

Clete believes “Louisiana is floating away while the worst people in the country wipe their feet on us.” Dave observes: “Louisiana is a haunted place. Maybe it has to do with our guilt.” That guilt includes Civil War editorials “about the supposed lust of black males and how the ferocity of their emancipation would be imposed on white women,” foreshadowing the Willie Horton ads of modern politics.

Despite its allusion to the supernatural (Robicheaux wonders if he is in an alternate reality when he discovers that Louisiana has turned into Vietnam), an action scene near the novel’s end is tense and powerful, a combination that thriller writers often try to evoke, typically with less success than Burke. A scene with a gunner firing from a Huey struck me as highly improbable, but still less outlandish than action scenes in most modern thrillers. The abundance of supernatural elements in the story’s climax was nevertheless excessive.

Ultimately, The Hadacol Boogie is about pain and how to deal with it. Dave Robicheaux doesn’t want to give anyone advice, but his message resonates: the best way to cope with pain is to be a good person, to do good things, to carry on in the present without dwelling on (or forgetting) the past. That is the consistent theme of Robicheaux novels and it is one of the reasons Burke has been laminated on my list of top three crime novelists of the modern era.

RECOMMENDED

A Hole in the Sky by Peter F. Hamilton

Published by Angry Robot on January 20, 2026

A Hole in the Sky isn’t expressly marketed as Young Adult fiction, but it has all the hallmarks. The plot is linear and simple. The story’s moral messages (primarily, “be better than the people you dislike”) are equally simple. Only a few characters are significant, and most characters of significance are in their teens. The heroine isn’t a virgin (her teenage hormones are raging) but, notwithstanding her crush on a young man from another village, the story steers away from sexual encounters. The absence of swearing or colorful language — a young man named Frazier says “oh my dayz” instead of dropping an F-bomb — also seems to pitch the tone toward a younger audience. Frazier is both a nerd and a virgin, the kind of character who appeals to (and often describes) young sf fans.

A generation ship called Daedalus is on its way to a new home. The ship originally intended to colonize the planet Kianira but the voyagers found a life form there that had the potential to evolve sentience. In defiance of Stephen Miller’s assertion that strong people are entitled to destroy weaker aliens simply because they can, the surprisingly ethical passengers decided to leave the planet in peace as they set course for their second choice.

Some passengers, apparently not wishing to prolong the voyage, rebelled. They smashed the medical machinery and food processors in the hope of forcing the ship to turn around. The rebels failed — or so the passengers have been taught — because the captain somehow merged with the ship’s AI (assuming the title of “Electric Captain,” another clue that this is YA fiction) and charted a course to the second-choice planet.

The passengers originally lived in hundred-story condo towers, but the ship has vast acres of farmland. The Electric Captain taught the passengers to farm the soil and raise chickens. They built cabins and villages. A canal that runs through the ship acts as a highway for animal-towed barges that transport people from one village to another. Adopting the Electric Captain’s new social order in the absence of food machines, the passengers agreed that new births should be limited while all passengers should be recycled at age 65 to preserve resources. Passengers who don’t follow those rules are branded as “cheaters” and punished by being recycled.

The protagonist is Hazel. She has all the insecurities that afflict teenagers but demonstrates the moxie and resilience that the reader expects from a YA heroine. Just before she is about to be recycled, a cheater tells Hazel that the swirl they see in the sky is caused by an air leak. If it isn’t repaired, they’ll all die from lack of oxygen in a couple of years. Hazel is inclined to believe the cheater because she’s been getting headaches, but the village elders put their faith in the Electric Captain to protect them.

Hazel’s brother Frazier becomes partially paralyzed when he falls from a tree. The village is about to recycle him when Hazel snatches him away. They make their way to a condo tower, where they learn the truth about the rebellion and the ship’s current predicament. Naturally, Hazel decides to do something about it. Battles and heroic journeys ensue.

I can’t condemn a novel for being pitched to a younger audience — some YA novels are quite good, even for older readers — but I found little about A Hole in the Sky to admire. Despite a sprinkling of action scenes, the plot is relatively dull, as are the characters. The story is predictable and the science fiction elements are unremarkable.

Peter Hamilton apparently intends to milk the story’s content for a trilogy. There’s barely enough here for one novel. I won’t be reading the next books and I can’t recommend the novel to sf fans who enjoy the reasonably sophisticated space operas that Hamilton usually produces. I can give the novel a mild recommendation for YA fans and for sf fans who haven’t yet reached puberty. I might also recommend it to parents of young nerds who are looking for clean, uncontroversial reading material that their kids might enjoy.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS