The New Bad Thing by Michael Ebner was a real rollercoaster. It could totally be made into a movie, and while I was listening, I kept picturing Anna Kendrick or Aubrey Plaza playing the lead, Teagan Penn.

The story follows a journalist who becomes a vigilante and takes on terrorists. Teagan has this bold idea to team up with some shady, rich people to help rescue women kidnapped by a terrorist group. It’s a risky plan, and she’s doing it while going through infertility treatment.

You might think, how can someone going through infertility also be planning a big rescue mission? Because she’s a total boss! I love this. We’ve seen plenty of male characters in books and movies who aren’t trained fighters but still step up and get the job done. It’s awesome to see a woman doing the same thing.

Later on, Teagan gets pregnant, and the story shifts as she and her husband hide out, waiting for their baby.

The story is presented non-chronologically, with the opening gambit featuring an intense scene in which Teagan hides out in a hotel overtaken by terrorists. It’s a gripping moment, reminiscent of the opening sequence in Paris Has Fallen (the new series on Hulu).

The final chapters have some twists I didn’t see coming.

Overall, this book reads like it could be a movie, and I think the movie version might actually be better than the book.

Thanks to @netgalley and @penandpicture for the ALC!

Thank you to netgalley for providing me with this book in exchange for a review. It certainly was action packed it held my attention until the end. 3 stars 🌟 it was good.

2 stars - Thank you to Netgalley and publishers for the ARC audiobook of 'The New Bad Thing'. I really struggled to get into this book—it was just too much for me. The mix of espionage, terrorism, and an overwhelming number of characters made it hard to follow. I constantly lost track of who was who and what side they were on, except for the main character, Teagan. On top of all that, I found it incredibly frustrating that Teagan, who was undergoing IUI treatments and desperate to have children, was drinking—something that you cannot do while undergoing the treatment. Ultimately, this book just wasn’t for me.

Really enjoyed this book! It gives a tense and suspenseful vibe as you get emotionally connected to these characters and anticipate what’s next! A very easy to love FMC that you are rooting for the entire time! The story follows Teagan, that had a brilliant idea to help change the world, however she sought out the wrong people to help with this mission. This lead her straight into the clutches of some very dangerous & murderous people, putting her life in danger and all the people she holds near and dear to her heart. I am eager for book 2, especially with the way book 1 ended. Some of the best narration I’ve heard!

Thank you Pen and Picture for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Teagan is going through a bit of a life crisis and decides the best way to get through it is to focus on helping others. She decides to take on helping missing girls and women who have been kidnapped by a terrorist group. She had a well laid out plan that didn't go as planned. Now she's forced to fight for not only her life, but the baby she didn't expect to be pregnant withs life.

The book started out a little slow for me. It also was a little too all over the place. About a quarter of the way through it started to come together and I was able to better follow the storyline. I started to enjoy it then and looked forward to what was going to happen next.

I instantly hated Lexington! You could tell pretty early on that he was going to be super shady. I loved how supportive Teagan's husband was. He might have been a little too supportive, but what can you do in a situation they found themselves in.

One of the weird and a little unrealistic part about Teagan was her going from an investigative journalist to a bad a$$ helping to fight crime and outsmarting crime bosses.

I did enjoy the story overall and look forward to the second installment of this series!

Total: 3.25★
This is the first book I have ever read by this author. The thrill and suspense had me hooked all the way. Although I thoroughly enjoyed the book, some characters like Todd felt somewhat unnecessary in a way. Lexington also felt somewhat underdeveloped in my eyes. Teagan was a well developed character whom I ended up really liking. The story itself was a thrill to read, yet I have to deduct a couple of stars due to the underdeveloped characters and some of the parts which felt a Biot thrown in there. The book was fast paced and I finished it in two days. I do really recommend it, and look forward to the next book in the series.

I love an action packed, fast paced book and this delivered! Even better, our hero is a woman! Teagan, a journalist, is having a mid-life crisis (my words) when the country hears a terrorist group has kidnapped women and children from an embattled area. Teagan decides to act. Even though it’s illegal to use private resources and street vigilantes, she wants to intervene and help the kidnaped women. Unfortunately, she ends up in a Paris hotel, pregnant, her husband doesn’t know where she is, and she’s killed 2 men and her hotel is under siege from said terrorist group. Are they coming for her? Can she make it out alive?

This was a good fast paced, action packed story filled with plenty of twists and backstabbing. The narrator was perfect! Great to have some diversity in our hero’s! Believable, that a journalist would become a sort of mercenary fighting against seen atrocities. Wholly unbelievable that a married woman, suffering sever fertility issues, would find out she’s pregnant, and still decide to allow anyone to convince her to do anything that puts her baby at risk. That was so distracting I couldn’t get past it. Someone make this a movie and fix that part.

In this story, we find reporter Teagan struggling to get pregnant so she channels her energy into a nonprofit to help women being targeted by a terrorist organization. Things go awry when government and terrorists are involved and she finds out that no good deed goes unpunished as the money raised was stolen. She vows vengeance by any means necessary. The story follows her on her hunt and also finds that she is also being hunted.

I found the story exciting in places and a bit drawn out in others. The storyline was a good balance of adrenaline= pumping moments and character -driven scenes. Exactly what I expected when I chose to read this book.

I liked the narrator and would love to hear him read another book as I felt he brought the story to life. What I did not like was how I was taken out of the story when I heard a male voice trying to voice a female character that was so prominent in the story.


Thanks to #netgalley and #PenandPicture for a advanced readers copy in exchange for my unbiased review

The book opens with a terrorist attack that we learn is staged to cover the murder of Teagen Penn, a journalist who has become an activist led to causes by her heart strings. Then we quickly turn back the clock to meet Teagen on her home ground, a magazine office in Seattle. Her personal problems have led her to jump start an operation outside normal channels to save kidnapped children. She will face more danger from her co-conspirators as the project quickly goes off the rails. She must learn the strength of her resolutions before she becomes front page news.

Michael Ebner has done an excellent job of developing Teagen and her supporting cast of characters into three dimensional figures that are true to their chosen lives. None are completely good or bad, except maybe Roman, but a mixture as their consciences push their efforts. Teagen proves to be a woman torn between actions and consequences as her efforts to save these children push her into events where it's not just her life on the line. As the first book in a new series, THE NEW BAD THING has set the backstory and core characters to insure a loyal following just waiting for the next book. I received an audio book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion. The narration adds a dimension of tension as the story builds. Braden Wright read the story as I would have read it, with all of the passion and emotion Ebner built into Teagan and this introductory book. It mixes several genre along the way, so if you love a book that reads as a headline from the nightly news with awesome characters, you've found it.

4.5⭐ (audio) I listen to tons of audiobooks, and as long as the narrator doesn't take me out of the story, I'm a happy (enough) camper. Braden Wright does a good job with this one, but it would have made more sense to have a female narrator, as the main character is female.

4⭐ (story) A reporter confronts terrorists, the mafia and fertility issues in Ebner’s new series starter” (Kirkus Reviews). Teagan is successful in her own right but she’s not the crusader journalist she aspired to be back in college. She needs a personal distraction and decides to make a difference in the world. When a foreign news story shocks her to the core, she takes matters into her own hands and starts a special project. But not everybody will be happy about her plans. When Teagan travels to Paris to deal with a project setback, she wakes up in a luxury hotel in the middle of a terrorist siege. Or is it a planned attack on her life?

Like other survivors from the siege, she is taken to a local police station. Routine questioning turns to intense interrogation by an American–a European Counterterrorism agent–Robert Lexington. She is the only one in custody who has seen Roman in the last ten years. Teagan is persuaded by Lexington to help locate him–a high priority person of interest–and in return she will avoid the courts and military prison back home.

Ebner is a new author for me, and I was pleasantly surprised at this fast-paced thriller. I enjoyed the story from the beginning, and the twists and turns kept the suspense level on high the whole time. Highly recommended! 4⭐

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced audio copy (ARC) in exchange for an honest review!

THE NEW BAD THING Book 1 by Michael Ebner
This is a fast paced crime thriller that has lots of suspense, intensity, twists, turns and the mafia. Teagan is a strong, complex, resilient woman that is caught up in a few things that sort of go from one to another. I am looking forward to the next book. This is 4 stars.
I listened to the audio book and Braden Wright did a very good job with the narration.

The New Bad Thing is a fast-paced thriller featuring Teagan Penn, a Seattle journalist who gets entangled in a dangerous web involving terrorists, the mafia, and covert operations. As she navigates this treacherous landscape, Teagan's determination and resourcefulness are put to the test. Ebner crafts an engaging narrative with rich character backstories and complex motivations, making it a compelling read for fans of action-packed espionage stories.

This was very good. I listened to it on audiobook and really enjoyed it. The story is very intense following a crime organization and a woman who unfortunately gets involved. There are a lot of twists and turns that happen throughout the book. This book is full of action and intense situations. This book definitely kept me interested through the entire thing. I finished it in one sitting. I definitely recommend it!

I listened to the audiobook and recieved it from netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

In terms of audio, the narrator was clear and well spoken. I had trouble with the fact that the main character is a woman, from the point of view of a woman yet the audio narrator is a man. Takes me out of the story a little but that is my personal preference.

Story wise, this was a short action packed original story with the feel of the movie Peppermint and Taken. If you like those and John wick, you may like this story. However, I did feel like the second half of the story lost my interest in an odd way that I can't explain. Perhaps I feel like I've been there before or it was predictable enough that while it was very entertaining, it was something expected.

The writing is well done and flows along at a good pace. Decent story for a fun time!

This was my first experience reading a book by Michael Ebner, and the intriguing premise immediately drew me in. The story did not disappoint, delivering a fast-paced and engaging plot that kept me hooked from start to finish.

While the book was well-executed—featuring a solid plot, well-developed characters, and excellent pacing—I struggled with the audiobook format. Although the narrator, Braden Wright, has a pleasant voice and a strong delivery, the mismatch between the female protagonist’s perspective and the male narrator didn’t quite work for me. It created a disconnect that made it harder to immerse myself in the story fully.

That said, the book has a lot of strengths:
Plot: Intriguing and well-constructed.
Characters: Believable and compelling.
Pacing: Keeps the momentum going, maintaining reader engagement.
As someone who loves audiobooks as my go-to format for reading, this one didn’t quite hit the mark, but I’d recommend it for readers who might prefer print or are less sensitive to narration style.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pen and Picture Publishing for providing me with an audio-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I have to say that I unfortunately did not finish this audiobook, I found it difficult to get past the 60% mark. I found the narrator to be great but I was so confused by a man narrating for a woman character. As a thriller fan this just didn't keep me engaged in the story line and I couldn't connect to the characters. I would try something different from the author in book form possibly.

Special thanks to #NetGalley and #PenandPicture for this #ARC audiobook.

This is the first book I’ve “read” by Michael Ebner and I was hooked from the very beginning! I listened to the audiobook version and really enjoyed the narrator in addition to the story itself.

It really seemed like I was listening to a movie playing out. Great character development and action packed throughout the book.

Thank you to netgalley and Pen and Paper for a copy of this audiobook in lieu of my honest review.

I received this audiobook from NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased opinion. I want to be fair but I'm also just going to be honest about this audiobook... I didn't like it. I don't understand why a book that was about a female main character had a male audiobook narrator whose tone was flat and performance was boring. As a woman who is struggling with fertility issues, I didn't like this being the driving force for this celebrity reporter to turn their life into what came off as a spy thriller. The pacing was all over the place and the plot bounced from idea to idea. In audiobook format, it's hard to know what was the past, present, or future as there wasn't a firm clear boundary line between them. Some people may like that, but I am not one of them. There was also a lot of info-dumping instead of working the details of the characters into the storyline, which led me to not feel as deep as a connection with the characters. Also, the MC being a conventionally attractive white woman who's only physical flaw is her facial scar is boring, but not as boring as the constant reminder that she's having fertility issues and treatment. Even listening at a faster speed, the narration was slow and ill-fitting.

Wow! What a tight, fast paced, on the edge of your seat thriller Michael Ebner has created and Braden Wright has breathed life into.

The New Bad Thing follows a journalist who is seeing her younger self’s goals and aspirations torn and tattered at her feet. Instead of processing this devastating realization she decides she needs a pet project. She and her husband try to start a family but need a little assistance. Thank goodness for medical advancements, Teagan becomes pregnant. But she’s still not feeling fulfilled. She hears a humanitarian story on the news and decides that THIS is that project. After she arrives in Paris, her hotel is attacked by terrorists. Instead of being considered a witness or better yet a victim of the terrorist attacker, she is questioned incessantly. From there it’s a race against time to find the person of interest behind the attack in order to protect her family.

This is the first book I have listen to where the narrator is Braden Wright. Wow! He is a narrator to keep your eye on. He made sure the intensity of his voice matched the scene in the book. Mr. Wright took what was already an excellent book and elevated it to a new level. So if you have the chance to listen to the audiobook, do it. You won’t be disappointed.

Thank you to #netgalley and Pen and Paper who I received a copy of The New Bad Thing audiobook in lieu of my honest review.

Cinematic!
This book could definitely be made into a movie. Anyone who likes action thrillers will love this story. It is an edge of your seat page turner. I read it in one sitting it is unputdownable. The narrator was a perfect match to the text. Really gave life to the events. I can't wait for the next one.