Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Penny, famous for her Chief Inspector Gamache series of mystery novels, teamed up with Hillary Clinton in the political thriller State of Terror (2021). Here Penny joins forces with award-winning Canadian journalist Fung for a thriller in which an estranged mother and daughter must put aside their differences to prevent a terrorist attack that could disrupt the fragile peace among the world's superpowers. Is the Chinese government poised to perpetrate an act of global terrorism? Vivien Li, a former Chinese dissident who escaped the country in the late 1980s after Tiananmen Square and became an activist for a free China, is called in to advise the U.S. president. But what she says is unexpected. She’s not entirely sure China is the villain. While the strained relationship between Vivien and her daughter Alice forms the emotional core of the book, readers will be captivated by the race-against-time structure of the story. Vivien and Alice have very little time to unmask the conspirators, and they must risk their own lives to save millions. A treat for Penny’s fans, and a solid political thriller in its own right.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Penny guarantees reader avidity, and this intriguing pairing with Fung will double the appeal.

Publishers Weekly
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Novelist Penny (the Chief Inspector Gamache novels) and journalist Fung (Between Good and Evil) combine their talents in this intelligent espionage thriller centered on a strained mother-daughter relationship. Food blogger Alice Li is dining in Washington, D.C., with her mother, Vivien, a celebrity dissident who fled China after the Tiananmen Square protests, when a powerful cyberattack triggers a worldwide power outage. In the aftermath, Vivien is called to the White House to help determine if the attack came from China. Alice is surprised when she’s asked to tag along, and then, during a high-level meeting, questioned about her friend Liam Palmer, a fellow foodie who’d invited her to D.C. Alice’s confusion turns to grief when she’s informed that Liam was found murdered in Hong King’s Victoria Harbour, and may not be who he said he was. Thrust into the middle of the investigation, Alice joins forces with her mother, whose notoriety has always irked her, to figure out what caused the attack and prevent future damage. Penny’s trademark humor (“She’d taken refuge there to relieve herself. Of her mother”) mingles well with Fung’s political expertise. The result is an eerily plausible nail-biter. (May)

Library Journal
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Much like her collaboration with Hillary Clinton, Penny's latest, written with journalist Fung (Between Good and Evil: The Stolen Girls of Boko Haram), ventures beyond the quaint yet eccentric small-town Canadian people and places of her "Three Pines" books. Unlike many political thrillers, though, this book is character-driven and nuanced, with as much attention paid to mother-daughter dynamics and the details of everyday life as is paid to action and intrigue. When fire and security alarms go off worldwide during one of Alice Li's rare visits with her mother, Vivien, the women are called to work together at the behest of the president—something familiar to human rights activist Vivien but surprising for food blogger Alice, who has lived in her mother's shadow. Together, the women become caught up in conspiracies that take them from the Oval Office to Ohio and then to Hong Kong, where they unlock old legends and languages long ago invented by women, in order to stop what could be a cataclysmic attack. VERDICT At once a fast-paced tale of power, greed, terror, and conviction and an introspective examination of the personal and cultural narratives that make people who they are, this will appeal to readers of Laura Lippman, Gillian McAllister, and James Patterson who are interested in thrillers as psychologically nuanced as they are page-turning.—Emily Bowles

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

What happens when an eminent mystery novelist collaborates with an award-winning journalist on a spy thriller? Pretty much everything you can imagine. While food blogger Alice Li is in retreat from her overbearing mother, famous Chinese dissident Vivien Li, in a restaurant bathroom, the alarm goes off. And not just the fire alarm, but every alarm in the city, the country, and around the world. Their triggering is clearly an act of terrorism, and the silencing of all those alarms, which comes as suddenly and inexplicably as their screeching, is anything but reassuring. Vivien spirits her daughter off to the White House, where Grant McAllister, the director of National Intelligence, informs Alice that her friend and fellow blogger Liam Palmer has just been fished from the Hong Kong harbor. McAllister and Alan Zhou, head of the China Mission Center, are convinced Liam knew something about those alarms, and President Fraser Pardington is determined to do whatever he can to prevent a sequel. He fails, of course, and the second act of global terrorism is even more disastrous than the first. All the president’s men and women initially believe the threat comes from the Chinese government, and Chinese President Chen Jiayang thinks the Americans might be behind it. Alice and Vivien race around the globe to track down the culprit, and what they find will knit together the fates of Alice’s family, the U.S. and China, and the history of the world as we know it. It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.