Untouchable by Jeffery Deaver

Published by Amazon Original Stories on February 17, 2026

I’m not a fan of Deaver’s Constant Marlowe stories, largely because Marlowe is the kind of self-righteous character who thinks she’s entitled to bully people. Marlowe is a special agent with the Illinois Department of Criminal Investigations. She starts Untouchable by detaining a man she doesn’t know because a young woman began to cry after he spoke to her. That hardly seems like evidence of a crime, given that the man walked past the woman on the sidewalk without speaking to her. The woman stopped and shouted an obscenity at him while screaming “Are you the one?” She only cried after he said something in response that Marlowe didn’t hear. Where is the crime? Why does Marlowe think she has the right to accost the man and demand his ID?

Marlowe believes her suspicions are founded because she sees “fear” in the woman’s eyes, notwithstanding the woman’s insistence that she doesn’t need help. Marlow believes she has a spidey sense that is triggered by women's hidden pain so she decides to meddle. Like too many crime novel heroines, Marlowe considers herself an avenging angel for abused women, but that doesn’t give her the right to abuse her authority as a law enforcement officer. And when Deaver tells us that “Constant Marlowe believed that rules were more suggestions than anything,” I have to wonder why a bully with a badge who disrespects the law is anyone a crime fiction fan would regard as a hero.

Jeffery Deaver could have used this novella to explore Marlowe’s sense of entitlement or her willingness to violate the civil rights of men in her quest to protect women. Instead, like most writers who glorify “tough guy” cops of either gender, he appears to believe that readers should admire a character who routinely betrays her oath to uphold the Constitution.

Marlowe carries a locked bag so that, when a suspect doesn’t conform to her behavioral standards, she can lock up her gun and challenge him to a fight. Cops should be fired when they start fights, even if they believe the men they beat up “deserve it.” But when Marlowe hands her locked weapon to a stranger to hold for her — someone who might make off with her firearm while she’s busy fighting — I have to wonder why anyone would believe she should be allowed to carry a badge.

Regardless of my reservations about Marlowe, I am always prepared to be entertained by a good story. Untouchable falls short. Marlowe is doing something in Prescott, Illinois, home to fictional Hamline University, when she sees the encounter between Kathleen Delaine (the crying woman) and the unfortunate man who leered at her.

Marlowe learns that Delaine wrote a letter to the local newspaper suggesting that Hamline’s football program should pay more attention to concussions and the lasting brain damage they can cause. She is unfairly blamed on social media for destroying the football program as vengeance for being dumped by a football player. Someone posts a photo of Delaine sleeping on the team bus and accuses her of shagging the entire team.

A Manosphere podcaster picks up the story and Delaine begins to receive nasty emails suggesting all the sexual fantasies the emailers would like to act out with her. When she shouted “Are you the one?” she was asking whether he sent the emails. She shouts the same question to every guy who gives her a knowing smile.

The plot addresses Marlowe’s effort to identify the “stalker” emailer, a quest that has her confronting the podcaster. None of this is particularly interesting. Neither are lectures about chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the various bullet calibers that start with .3 (.308, .32, etc.) and Marlowe’s career as a boxer.

Any interest the story might have generated is diminished by its preachy nature. While I broadly agree with its message that the Manosphere is doing the country no favors, I don’t enjoy heavy-handed lectures about the evils of social media delivered by psychopathic characters who would themselves benefit from a good lecture about appropriate behavior.

The story goes off the rails with the armed confrontation of a suspected stalker. That incident leads to a silly explanation for the stalking. Without spoiling anything, I’ll simply suggest that the bad guy’s motivation isn’t within spitting distance of being credible. Even if I had enjoyed the rest of the story, the attempt to reimagine the stalking as a component of a deeper and unrelated crime would have been sufficient reason not to recommend Untouchable.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Crossroads by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 24, 2026

Allegations of corruption in Wyoming politics have been in the news lately. Political corruption may help explain why The Crossroads opens with the discovery of Joe Pickett’s bullet-ridden body in his SUV on a road that branches off to three different ranches. Or maybe the shooters had a grudge against Joe for other reasons.

A hunter phoned the police to report the shooting but had to flee from the scene when the shooters made him their target. Joe is still alive (barely) when the sheriff and Joe’s wife arrive on the scene. He’s flown to a hospital in Billings where a neurosurgeon will deal with the bullet that entered his head.

Joe is in a coma during most of the novel. Joe’s daughters carry the story, with series regular Nate Romanowski making an occasional appearance. Since Nate is a psychopath masquerading as a libertarian hero, I was pleased that he played only a limited role.

The three daughters — Sheridan (27), April (25), and Lucy (23) — converge on the family home as they await news of their father. The story follows the daughters as they investigate the shooting. They theorize that their father was driving to one of the three ranches. The McElwee sisters are fiercely protective of their privacy. Wild animals seem to get drunk when they visit the McElwee ranch. Michael Thompson, the wealthy owner of the Double Diamond, is involved in a secret project on his land, one that may require political influence (and Joe's help) to bring to fruition. John and Shelby Bucholz occupy the third ranch and seem to be hiding someone in a dilapidated cabin. Adding to the mystery is a helicopter that repeatedly flies over the ranches.

Joe’s daughters split up to interview the three ranch families. Each daughter forms the impression that the rancher she interrogated may be committing crimes that Joe was investigating. The daughters weave elaborate theories to tie each rancher to the shooting. The reader’s job is to decide which rancher hired the shooters.

The two dolts who shot Joe are featured in a few short chapters. Their appearances prove that trigger pulls are not fueled by brainpower. Fortunately, the shooters don’t spoil the mystery by revealing the mastermind behind the assassination attempt.

Occasional flashbacks show the reader what Joe was doing in the days before the shooting. Moving the spotlight away from Joe isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because Joe is the strong silent type with an emphasis on silent. If he can hold up his end of a conversation by saying “yup” and looking down, that’s what he’ll do. Joe’s personality might be described as stalwart, but that would just be a nicer way of saying that Joe is a boring guy. When C.J. Box writes a Joe Pickens novel that entertains, the entertainment comes from the plot or surrounding characters, not so much from Joe.

I appreciated Box’s decision not to have collateral characters gripe about cultural issues (Joe never indulges in controversial opinions). A character makes a predictable complaint about wind turbines, but a novel set in Wyoming wouldn’t be realistic if characters didn’t express their “it’s all about me” political philosophy. Those opinions have been distracting in some Pickett novels, but Box keeps his focus on the plot in this one.

The Crossroads is a solid entry in the Pickett series. The mystery is engaging and the resolution is credible. The evil ranchers are amusing. They each have a credible motive to put Joe in a grave. Box sprinkles in enough action scenes to keep the story moving but doesn’t try to turn the daughters into action heroes. Because the story makes few references to events that occurred in earlier novels, crime novel fans who haven’t tried a C.J. Box novel can easily read The Crossroads as an introduction to the series.

RECOMMENDED

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