The Bottom Line: A fast-moving spy thriller where island secrets, family loyalties and old lies collide with explosive force.
As Kauai Spies and Bald-faced Lies opens in 1996, twenty-seven-year-old Max Volkov and his twenty-four-year-old wife, Anya, are asleep above their print shop in Kharuta, Russia, when a drunken mob forces its way inside. Fueled by antisemitic hatred and resentment, the men target the Jewish-owned shop, smashing the presses, assaulting the couple, and setting fire to the business and home Max and Anya have built together.
This tragedy sends Max and Anya into flight from Russia and eventually toward the United States. Authors Larry and Rosemary Mild then cut to ten years later in Hawai‘i, where Kent Brukner, once an American spy and now a Honolulu lawyer, is asked to prepare a partnership agreement for Kauai Technical Systems, a startup building a secret missile-tracking recorder for the U.S. military on Kauai. The assignment should be legal paperwork. Instead, it pulls Kent back toward the world of classified technology, old Russian shadows, and people who are not telling him nearly enough.
The Milds sharpen the danger when the company’s chief financial officer faces a nightmare: his son is kidnapped, and the ransom demand is not money but plans and specifications for the recorder. From that point, the book’s questions become both personal and national in scale. Is someone inside Kauai Tech feeding information outward? Is the threat coming from espionage, local grievance, or another agenda entirely?
From a craft perspective, the most distinctive choice is the book’s braided structure. It does not follow a single narrow investigation from start to finish. Instead, it interweaves the Volkovs’ immigrant backstory, Kent’s legal-spy case, the Kauai land dispute, the kidnapping plot, and the Sorokin inheritance mess. That makes the novel feel expansive, closer to a multi-strand suspense drama than a lean spy thriller. As the novel widens, these multiple strands begin to converge nicely. The later chapters keep widening the circle of suspicion, turning what first looks like a contained legal problem into a case with far more dangerous implications.
In line with the book’s playful title, the novel delivers moments of warmth and wry domestic humor. The surrounding cast also gives the book a broad, lived-in feel. Kent is alert, capable, and still shaped by his intelligence past, but he is not the usual isolated thriller operator. His marriage to Katcha, now a Russian immigrant wife, American citizen, college student, and mother to their son Paulie, keeps the suspense rooted in domestic stakes.
Kauai Spies and Bald-faced Lies differentiates by weaving espionage with the heart of a domestic thriller, and the combination makes for compelling reading. While the novel is the second series book, it can be enjoyed as a standalone.
