The Method by Matthew Quirk

Published by William Morrow on January 20, 2026

Anna Vaughn isn’t an action hero, but she’s an actress who has trained in boxing and other martial arts so she can play action roles on television. While she hasn’t had a particularly successful career, she has played a few parts, usually ending in death scenes. By the novel’s end, Anna comes across as a Special Forces combat trainer combined with a cage fighter. I never bought the notion that an actress who learned enough moves to earn roles on cable TV shows would so readily defeat armed killers in fight after fight. But such is the nature of the modern thriller

Anna’s best friend, Natalie Harris, also works in the film and TV industry. Natalie likes to party. Anna is sure Natalie is keeping a secret from her. Perhaps she has a new boyfriend she doesn’t want Anna to know about. When they get together for their weekly movie night, Natalie has a more expensive bottle of wine than she would ordinarily buy. Anna overhears Natalie say something about a “red door” during a hushed telephone conversation.

Natalie disappears. We soon learn that Natalie is being interrogated by a psychopath named Sontag. He wants to recover a flash drive that has videos of women being tortured and killed. How did Natalie get the videos? The answer, like the novel as a whole, is hard to swallow.

Going through her stuff in search of clues to Natalie’s disappearance, Anna finds a cocktail napkin from an upscale hotel. Anna visits the hotel bar and meets a fellow named Sebastian Valand, who seems to take an interest in her. Sebastian wants to introduce her to a wealthy man who has an interest in film, which might be code for an interest in hot actresses. Anna suspects that accepting that introduction will lead her to Natalie.

Kevin Matthews, who plays a shadowy role in the government, is also interested in Anna, primarily because of Sebastian. Matthews is tasked with finding a violent guy named Malak. He recruits Anna to act as an undercover agent, although the last woman he recruited for that role ended up dead. This time he promises to be more careful.

The plot is something of a mess. It blends together evil people from an oil-producing country, corrupt politicians, and a dubious plan to give Americans cheap gas (at least no foreign invasion is required). The torture videos have little to do with the rest of the plot (it turns out that authoritarians don’t want their sex crimes exposed; who knew?) but Matthew Quirk had to add them to get the action started. I didn’t buy it for a second.

The Method is the kind of thriller that comes across as a treatment for a movie, perhaps written with the hope that a producer will buy the film rights. Unfortunately, when Anna jumps from one roof to another, flying across a fourteen-foot gap, catching herself on the edge and pulling herself to safety as bullets whiz past her, the movie scene is far too familiar to work well in prose. Anna makes so many daring escapes that the last time she’s handcuffed, I was kinda hoping the villain would kill her for the sake of verisimilitude.

Quirk tries to give Anna a personality by making her afraid of finishing a fight, so the reader knows she will need to overcome that fear by the novel’s predictable ending. On the plus side, the story moves rapidly and Quirk’s prose is smooth. The Method is fairly typical of modern action thrillers, combining a convoluted and unbelievable plot with standard action scenes. The ending is contrived. Action thriller junkies might enjoy it, but there are better examples of the genre to bring to the beach.

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