Category: Reading Challenges

Book Review – Throw Away the Key by Jason M. Hough @crookedlanebks #20BOS26

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About the Book

Lars Bergman is no ordinary janitor. He’s the CIA’s locksmith. 

Formerly part of the CIA’s infamous Surreptitious Entry Team, Lars is now responsible for every padlock, safe, and secure door across the CIA headquarters. He’s never met a lock he couldn’t pick…except one, which he tried and failed to open during a botched mission in Warsaw at the end of the Cold War. 

Cruising toward retirement, Lars’s life is upended when a senior CIA official dies and he’s called upon to open the safe in her office. Inside the safe is a clue only Lars would notice, left by someone he’d worked with in his heyday. As he investigates, Lars soon realizes that his failed Warsaw operation has come back to haunt him and perhaps give him another chance at picking the one lock that’s ever eluded him. 

What Lars doesn’t realize is that what the lock is protecting could have dire ramifications for the organization he has spent his whole adult life safekeeping.

Format: Paperback (320 pages) Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Publication date: 14th July 2026 Genre: Thriller

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My Review

Cryptic clues – a photograph and a seemingly innocuous document – found in the safe of a deceased senior CIA officer whom Lars worked with many years before sets him on a trail that leads back to Warsaw, the location of a failed ‘off the books’ mission back in 1989. It’s a failure that’s stuck in his mind ever since because it involved one of the very few locks he was unable to pick and, worst of all, he left a trace of his attempt to do so.

Disguising his trip as a long overdue vacation, Lars sets out on a private mission to uncover the truth, weaving a trail across Europe aimed at covering his tracks so as not to attract the attention of his bosses. It means using the ‘tradecraft’ he learned while in the field all those years ago, such as how to spot covert surveillence. Along with his exceptional lockpicking skills, he has to use a good deal of ingenuity, constructing lockpicking tools out of virtually nothing, and his ‘sixth sense’ for when something’s not quite right.

There are some terrific set-pieces, including one in a Swiss bank that could have come out of a heist movie, and some narrow escapes. Lars is definitely a character you can’t help rooting for and I liked he was able to call in favours from people he’d helped over the years.

Eventually, the trail leads back to CIA headquarters and some dramatic scenes as a conspiracy years in the making is revealed. It’s here that Lars’ ingenuity really comes to the fore, proving that the weak points in any organisation’s security are usually at the back door and come with a High Vis jacket.

It’s clear the book is the result of extensive research, especially into locks and lockpicking. I’m not sure I could unpick a lock using the descriptions in the book but that’s my failing not the author’s. However I could bandy around terms such as ‘wiper tension bar’ and ‘shim’. And I now know there is such a thing as competitive lockpicking and that there’s an annual LockCon conference attended by lockpicking experts from across the world.

Throw Away the Key is a really entertaining, well-paced spy thriller. Think the love child of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Mission Impossible.

I received a digital advance reader copy courtesy of Crooked Lane Books. Throw Away the Key is book 8 of my 20 Books of Summer 2026.

In three words: Clever, compelling, pacy
Try something similar: The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson

About the Author

Jason M. Hough (pronounced ‘Huff’) is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Dire Earth Cycle, Instinct, and the near-future spy thriller Zero World, which Publisher’s Weekly said is “a thrilling action rampage that confirms Hough as an important new voice in genre fiction.”
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In a former life he was a 3D artist, animator, and game designer (Metal Fatigue, Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction, and many others). He has worked in the fields of high-performance cluster computing and mobile user interfaces, and is named as co-inventor on three patents related to mobile content and licensing.

He lives near Seattle, Washington with his family. When not writing, reading, or hanging out with his kids, he spends his time chasing espresso perfection (with mixed results), and taking long road trips in his electric car.

Connect with Jason
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Book Review – Paper Sisters by Rachel Canwell @northodoxpress

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About the Book

Lincolnshire, 1914. As the First World War approaches, three women are living, isolated between the unforgiving marsh and relentless river of the fen. Their lives are held fast by profound grief, haunted by the spectres of the past. Trapped by the looming presence and eerie stillness of a hospital that has never admitted a single patient.

Eleanor longs to escape with the man she loves, leaving her sister and memories behind. Clara’s violent marriage threatens her and her children’s safety. Lily, resolute and unyielding, will do whatever it takes to preserve the past and keep her family unchanged, regardless of the cost.

Format: Paperback (384 pages) Publisher: Northodox Press
Publication date: 12th February 2026 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I’m not sure you could come up with a more atmospheric setting for a novel than this. A house on the remote Lincolnshire Fens, separated from the nearest village by a wide stretch of river which can only be crossed by a swing bridge. And beyond the house, a hospital which has never housed a single patient. ‘Dark, squat against the earth, an abandoned sentry to the fen beyond.’ Yet there’s also a feeling of claustrophobia because of the intensity of what is playing out inside the house.

Eleanor, Lily and their brother Frank have all been profoundly affected by a tragic death. Frank, now estranged from his sisters, has become an angry, bitter man often erupting into drunken violence, with his wife Clara the main victim. Lily’s grief seems to have triggered a descent into madness, so much so that Eleanor fears for her sister’s safety and locks her in the house when she visits the village. Or more likely, the hospital because Eleanor spends her days going through the ‘practised and pointless’ routine of folding towels, cleaning floors and changing sheets on beds that have never been occupied.

Before long we realise there is a sinister game being played out between the two sisters, a contest of wills in which Lily appears to have the upper hand. In one memorable scene, the sisters stand either side of a locked door, each straining to hear sounds of movement from the other, waiting to see who will yield first.

Eleanor’s mistake is to underestimate Lily’s capacity for manipulation and her determination to ensure they remain a family unit. Only their sister-in-law Clara sees through Lily’s wiles and understands her objective is to destroy any chance of Eleanor marrying John, the local blacksmith, and allow her to break free from her constrained existence.

There’s another factor though. This is 1914 and the first inklings of war are starting to appear, such as the compulsory purchase of horses by the army. Soon the young men of the village are joining up, fuelled by feelings of patriotism. For those left behind it means uncertainty, worry and a dashing of hopes for the future. Ironically for others, it brings a respite, even the possibility of a different future. Soon, of course, the news is one long roll call of those killed or wounded, some of whom have suffered life-changing injuries both physical and psychological.

Both Eleanor and Lily are women of extreme emotions. There’s screaming, crying, pounding on doors. So much so that at times it all felt rather frenzied. I struggled to find any redeeming features in Lily. I found myself urging Eleanor to recognise she was being manipulated whilst also appreciating her feelingsof responsibility for her sister. My favourite character was Clara – astute, courageous and determined to do whatever was necessary to protect her children.

There’s an undercurrent of tension throughout the book, a sense of a pressure slowly and inexorably building so that, even before it happens, you know it’s inevitable there’s going to be some sort of explosive finish.

Paper Sisters is an atmospheric story of simmering emotions and the weight of secrets.

In three words: Emotional, intense, dramatic
Try something similar: Blasted Things by Lesley Glaister

About the Author

Rachel Canwell is an author who, having grown up in the Fens, has lived and worked in Cumbria for over twenty years.

Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies. Her collection of flash fiction Oh I Do Like to Be was published in 2022 and her novella-in-flash Magpie Moon in 2023.

Paper Sisters is her first novel. (Photo/bio: Publisher website)

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