The Asset by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Crime on February 3, 2026

The newest entry in Mike Lawson’s long-running Joe DeMarco series departs a bit from the usual political crimes that DeMarco either thwarts or commits. DeMarco is a fixer for John Mahoney, the leader of the Democratic party in the House of Representatives. Mahoney is currently the minority leader but will presumably become the Speaker if Lawson completes the next novel after the 2026 midterms.

A relatively plain college student named Jenny McMillian is having an affair with a hot professor named Noah Parker. They have some drinks at a rural diner before Jenny drives them to Noah’s place. Jenny takes a corner too fast and slams the car into a man who is standing in the middle of the road. Noah encourages her to leave the dead body and flee the scene with him to avoid the complication of being charged with a DUI that causes a death.

Someone took a video of the crash. Zhou Enlai, a spy in China’s embassy, uses the video to blackmail Jenny’s mother, Lydia Chang. Since Chang is married to Dutch McMillian, the Republican leader of the Senate, Enlai believes Chang can gain access to classified information.

Diane Lake, a former CIA agent who now works for a firm that does political investigations, sees Enlai having a clandestine meeting with Chang and concludes that Chang is a spy. She brings that information to Mahoney, who suspects that Lake has an ulterior motive. He tasks DeMarco with getting to the bottom of the story.

The novel follows DeMarco as he interviews Chang and Jenny, learns something disturbing about Noah (more disturbing that his shagging of students), and tries to learn how the video was made. The plot is twisty but not convoluted. Some aspects are improbable, but less so than is typical of modern crime novels.

A secondary plot involves a hog butcher in Kentucky who witnessed a gruesome act committed by a Republican political candidate. Mahoney wants DeMarco to verify the story so Mahoney can use it to trash her candidacy. DeMarco’s adventures in Kentucky add comic relief to the story, although Lawson always writes with a light touch. Notably, while the gruesome act should be disqualifying for any political office, it is drawn from the life of a real person who held political office and currently holds a cabinet position notwithstanding that stain on her character.

I appreciate the way Lawson loosely conforms the DeMarco stories to the real world of politics without getting too far into the weeds. Readers of most political viewpoints can enjoy the novels without feeling obligatory outrage because Lawson insulted their favorite politician.

DeMarco might not be the most admirable protagonist in the world of thrillers, but that’s part of his charm. He holds his nose while doing his job and, while he’d rather be golfing, keeps at it so he can afford the greens fees. While he doesn’t always succeed, he does the best he can to keep himself free of political stink.

For a time, DeMarco worries that achieving the political end desired by Mahoney will cause a killer to go unpunished. The Asset arrives at a reasonably just resolution.  As always, the story moves quickly, no loose ends are left untied, and the ending is satisfying.

RECOMMENDED

Vigil by George Saunders

Published by Random House on  ‎ January 27, 2026

A growing number of novels tackle climate change in scenes of a postapocalyptic future. George Saunders has never been one to follow a beaten path.  His focus is on the fate of a successful oilman who bamboozled the public by sowing doubt about climate science. In his dying hour, will the man repent or will his narcissism blind him to any understanding of the harm he caused?

The story is narrated by Jill “Doll” Blaine. Jill’s body is buried in a cemetery in Stanley, Indiana. She was happily married to Lloyd until they switched cars and she was blown up in an explosion that targeted her husband.

Jill was elevated after she died. She is tasked with comforting people in their hour of death. Her latest charge is J.K. Boone. A French ghost tells Jill that rather than comforting Boone, she should “lead him, as quickly as possible, to contrition, shame, and self-loathing.” Boone wants nothing to do with contrition because “against heavy odds, he’d lived an extraordinary life full of tremendous accomplishment and had always done his best and, in sum, had done nothing wrong, not a goddamn thing, and was leaving behind no lasting harm, zero, nada, none at all: a world better for having had him in it, period, full stop.”

Boone’s narcissism is the foundation of the novel’s humor. Boone believes he had been “more important to the lives of the people on earth during his time than the vast majority of those dead-and-buried folks had been to theirs. That was just a fact. Even if you included kings. Strange but true: he’d had more actual power than most kings of old. Someone had told him that once and he supposed it was true. What a thing.”

Boone’s thoughts are occupied by buzz words. He argues that any trivial harm his business causes to the climate is more than offset by “progress,” “growth,” and “free markets.” He feels no qualms about paying scientists to cook their research so they could claim that climate change is not influenced by the fossil fuel industry. He would “stand onstage there in front of some packed auditorium and say: Right here, signatures from seventeen thousand scientists who don’t believe the science here is rock-solid.” Scrutiny of the petition would reveal thousands of signatures of people who didn’t exist but by the time inconvenient facts were revealed, low-information citizens had cemented the belief that climate change is a hoax. Their ignorance made it possible for Boone to head off political momentum toward clean energy alternatives.

Jill encounters other ghosts as she hangs with Boone, including the pseudo-scientists he exploited and victims of fires and drought and other climate-related catastrophes who are less interested in comforting Boone than in torturing him. She takes an amusing detour to a nearby wedding but eventually returns to her duty with the self-centered oil man.  

As much as certain branches of theology suggest the importance of repentance and atonement, is it realistic to believe that a lifetime of self-deception can be overcome at the end? A reader might appreciate Vigil for the philosophical and theological questions its poses. On a different level, a reader might be amused by the offbeat story Saunders tells. Either way, this end-of-life scenario showcases Saunders’ ability to advance unique perspectives about serious issues without taking himself too seriously. Saunders is always funny and that’s a sufficient reason to breeze through Vigil.

RECOMMENDED

Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro

First published in Mexico in 2022; published in translation by W.W. Norton/Liveright on January 20, 2026

The disturbing but familiar tropes of fiction from Mexico — drug cartels, violence against women — take a back seat to Brenda Navarro’s story of a woman whose move from Mexico to Spain did little to ease the pain of daily living. Most stories of emigration focus on the hope for a better life in a stable country. Navarro’s narrator has a different perspective: “Everyone wants to be something more, and they don’t even know how to be something less.” This is the only novel I can recall that looks back at the violence of a country like Mexico with nostalgia.

We never learn the narrator’s name, but her brother is Diego García. The narrator describes three defining events in her life. The first is her mother’s departure for Spain with the promise to send for her kids later. The narrator and her grandmother raise Diego as the years pass, waiting for their mother to make good on the promise. The narrator is clueless about what her mother has to do before she can obtain a residence card and arrange for their entry into Spain, but that is largely her mother’s fault for failing to keep her kids updated.

The second is the narrator’s eventual relocation to Spain with Diego. Most of the novel takes place in that country, first in Madrid where her mother lives and then in Barcelona where she joins her cousins to get away from her mother.

The third is Diego’s death by suicide. The narrator tells the reader about that death early in the story. It is the central event that shapes her young life.

While living in Spain, the narrator tells us that she misses everything about Mexico: “my grandmother cooking for me, even if there were times when she’d blow a gasket and get all intense, and my grandfather taking me to the movies. … And I missed the noise of the street, the music, how loud the cars were, and the tension.” She misses “not Mexico the country,” but “Mexico as a yearning.” Mostly she misses the innocence and joy of Diego as he was when they lived in Mexico. It appears that what she misses is not Mexico but the childhood she left there.

Oddly, she also misses “that strange sense of belonging, but at the same time of being a crab in a bucket climbing onto the backs of the others, trying to get out.” She misses “the passion that comes from hunger, from exhaustion, from discontent.” By contrast, Europe is passionless, a place where “what you breathed in was a sort of calm that was more like boredom. Europe seemed boring and old and lonely.”

The narrator isn’t saying that life is too easy in Spain — she still lives in relative poverty and hates the menial jobs she takes — but in Mexico she shared her hardships with others. She does not feel she belongs in Spain, where people look down on her because of her Mexican ancestry, her low station in life. She doesn’t like cleaning houses or the rear ends of old folk. She tries a gig job making deliveries but it wears her out. She doesn’t like her Scottish boyfriend because he exploits her. One message the novel delivers is that emigration leads to isolation for immigrants who are not accepted as equals in their new home.

While I appreciated that message, the story is not without its downsides. I came to think of the narrator as a whiner who has a sense of entitlement that people are usually born into. Yes, it’s hard being poor, but her stubborn refusal to return to Madrid where she could live a modestly better life with her mother, like her persistent lie to her boyfriend about being a college student, are not endearing actions. The narrator refuses to return because she “needed to prove to my mom that I could fend for myself, that we could have another kind of relationship where she wasn’t the one in charge, the one who decided for me.” Her uncle is the only character who has the courage to put her in her place: “In this family, he said, pointing a finger at me, your mother was the only one who was able to shake off all this shit we live in. Quit feeling sorry for yourself and honor her decision.”

By the novel’s end, the narrator redeems herself a bit by confessing her hypocrisy (she criticizes Diego for stealing but is herself a thief) and recognizing her selfish nature. In that sense, Eating Ashes might be seen as a coming-of-age novel with a “you can’t go home again” theme.

A more traditional theme in novels about immigration is the unfortunate reality of intolerance that pervades most nations. Ethnic Catalans in Spaiin don’t like other Spaniards, Spaniards don’t like immigrants, immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries don’t like Pakistanis, the old and the young dislike each other, and on and on. Diego’s school in Madrid punishes him for fights that were started by Spanish kids; school officials assume that the immigrant kid is the troublemaker. The narrator undergoes body cavity searches for drugs at border crossings while white people are unmolested. A character named Jimena who emigrated to Spain reminds readers of Mexico’s intolerance of the LGBTQ community.

After the narrator carries her brother’s ashes back to Mexico, we catch glimpses of the disappearances and sexual harassment that plague Mexican society. In the most vivid scene, a woman recounts the death of her sister, who is killed in a bar with a dozen others because her husband is in the military.  But this is not a story of human rights violations so much as it the very personal story of a young woman who has not yet overcome the grief and alienation that defines her life. The novel is a bit uneven but its most moving and insightful moments make it worthwhile for readers who want a different perspective on the experience of immigration.

RECOMMENDED

The Cormorant Hunt by Michael Idov

Published by Scribner on January 27, 2026

Of current authors of spy novels, only a handful reside in my first tier. Michael Idov has made that list on the strength of The Collaborators and its sequel, The Cormorant Hunt.

In the first novel, CIA agent Ari Falk made trouble for himself by giving a recording to an open-source intelligence website operated by Alan Keegan. In the recording, veteran CIA agent Rex Harlow confesses that he attempted to rig Russia’s 1996 election and, twenty-five years later, murdered several people who got wind of his dirty tricks. Harlow referred to the operation’s mastermind as the Cormorant.

The story begins with Katya Lisichenko crossing into Estonia from Russia in the early stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She is detained because records show that she made the same crossing two days earlier. She didn’t, so someone must have been using her name.

The story then shifts to Keegan’s receipt of an email with the subject line “a message for Ari Falk.” Keegan doesn’t know how anyone would know of his connection to Falk, apart from people at the top of the CIA hierarchy. Keegan traces the email to Petra Lorencová, an employee of Radio Free Europe in the Czech Republic. He travels there and confronts Petra, who claims she was paid by an unknown source to send the email. The meeting does not end well for Petra or Keegan.

We next encounter Falk, who is living off the grid in the Republic of Georgia. Worried that he is being framed for Keegan’s fate, Falk decides it is time to run. The current deputy director of operations at the CIA (who owes her job to Falk’s outing of Harlow), Asha Tamaskar, dispatches a Mormon CIA agent, Jim Otterbeck, to find Falk. Otterbeck dislikes Falk but the feeling is mutual. It helps Falk’s cause that Otterbeck is straight-laced while Falk is devious.

The other primary plot element involves Felix Burnham, the “champagne version” of Andrew Tate, an advocate of a silly but popular “men’s rights” movement. Burnham has the “slippery, shape-shifting charisma of a born cult leader.” Burnham’s podcast appeals to insecure young men who blame their problems on women, LGBTQ people, and nonwhite immigrants rather than their own disagreeable personalities.

Burnham’s podcast is, naturally enough, financed by Russia in its never-ending attempt to destabilize progressive western nations. Using those funds, Burnham is “putting together a purpose-built private army.” Tamaskar would like to do something about it, but worries that she will be undermined by the Cormorant.

In addition to Ivov’s ridicule of the men’s rights movement, I appreciated his take on the dangers of the modern world. Falk understands that, thanks to Russia, the left-right distinction is no longer relevant. “The only existential standoff now was between the people who wanted to replace institutions with better institutions and the people who wanted to replace institutions with themselves.”

As was true of the first book, the story is clever. The plot eventually links characters in unexpected ways. While the action moves quickly, Ivov takes time to flesh out secondary characters, assigning credible motivations that are consistent with their actions. While characters take heroic risks for the greater good, I also enjoyed the characterization of the CIA’s hackers as “insufferable geeks who considered themselves God’s gift to the Agency.”

In this second novel, Ivov cements himself as a must-read author for spy novel fans. His prose is clear and forceful, even if he lacks the stylistic brilliance of the genre’s master, John Le Carré. That’s not a knock, because there was only one Le Carré. In his ability to craft credible but exciting plots, reasonably deep characters, and perceptive analyses of world events, Idov is an exceptional spy novelist.

RECOMMENDED

Excession by Iain M. Banks

First published in 1996; published by Orbit on January 20, 2026

Long before AI became a media-dominant thing, Iain M. Banks was writing about a future shared by humans and a civilization of AI known as the Culture. Members of the Culture take the form of space-faring ships and, no less than humans but at much faster speeds, quarrel about moral behavior and their individual places in the universe.

Banks (who sans the middle initial, also wrote worthwhile mainstream novels) died in 2013, leaving behind nine novels and a collection of short stories in the Culture universe. Excession is the fifth in the series. Because it is one of the few I missed, I was pleased to see that Orbit is rereleasing the novel in paperback and ebook editions.

The story begins with Dajeil Gelian confined in a tower overlooking a hologram of a sea that is housed in a ship named Sleeper Service. Dajeil shares her prison with a black bird named Gravious. Dajeil is pregnant and, we eventually learn, has been in that condition for decades. The ship’s avatar notifies Dajeil that it finally has a mission and will be leaving its guests (most either bodies in suspended animation or existing as stored data) in appropriate habitats.

The mission involves the Excession, an alien entity or artifact that is connected to the energy grids that exist above and below the universe. Nobody known to the Culture has ever seen anything like it. It seems to be older than the universe itself; its ability to connect to the energy grids is astonishing. When a Culture offshoot, the Elench, stumbles upon it and investigates, the Elench ship is taken over. A drone manages to escape the ship but is soon destroyed, leaving behind a small but detectable (if another ship knows where to look) debris field.

Special Circumstances (the “espionage and dirty tricks department” of the Culture’s Contact section) recruits Byr Genar-Hofoen to perform a secret task that indirectly pertains to the Excession. Byr is currently a human ambassador to a war-prone alien race called the Affront. Special Circumstances arranges his transportation on an Affront vessel to a Culture ship that will rendezvous with Sleeper Service. It turns out that Byr and Dajeil have a history.

Much of the novel involves real and suspected conspiracies among various Culture ships that relate to the Excession. Some Culture ships want to manage contact with the Excession; others want to confront it. The Affront concoct a scheme to control some old Culture warships in an effort to claim the Excession for their own purposes. Chaos ensues.

The novel includes a story within a story that becomes the main story, focused on Byr’s troubled relationship with Dajiel. Most of this is told by way of backstory. No fan of monogamy, Byr nevertheless made a quasi commitment to Dajiel by changing himself into a woman (the process takes about a year in the far future but no surgery is required) so that both can become pregnant with the other’s child (no penetration needed, although Byr in male form is a big fan of penetration). Jealousy ensues when Byr, in female form, canoodles with another woman.

Excession is far from my favorite Culture novel but the universe Banks created is so intricate and interesting that I always enjoy paying it a visit. The few human characters behave like humans (i.e., they are messy) while the ships send wonderfully snarky messages to each other. The potential war between the Culture and Affront, as well as the potential conflict with the Excession, resolve in a way that might be criticized as predictable, but the process of getting to that point is more than half the fun. While the story is lengthy and occasionally bogs down, I have to recommend it to Culture fans.

Newcomers to the series should probably start with the first novel, Consider Phlebas, to gain context that will aid appreciation of the others. Consider Phlebas is also one of the best in the series. Culture completists should nevertheless add Excession to their Banks collection if they haven't already.

RECOMMENDED