A tense psychological thriller with an intriguing setup but too many far-fetched twists at the end.
Grad students are tasty snacks in the shark tank of faculty ambition.
Gentry sets her third thriller in the world of academe, where we find a slew of powerful female characters and some male eye candy. Mackenzie Claire Woods has just finished her keynote at an academic conference in LA and is about to take a young fellow she knows only as "Harvard" up to her room in the SkyLoft Hotel when she spots her long-estranged childhood best friend. Gwen Whitney was the princess to Mac's pauper, her escape route from a hardscrabble childhood that included junior beauty pageants, her father's abandonment, her mother's drug addiction, and a disabled sister. Both Mac and Gwen went on to graduate school at The Program, a taxing course of study in rarefied disciplines, painted with a welcome touch of satire. Coming from her family, is it any wonder grad student Mac can't make heads or tails of topics like Diasporic Feminisms, Dualities of Motion and Emotion, and Introduction to Economimesis? Most problematically, she can't get through a tome titled "Ethical Negation," written by the faculty star, Bethany Ladd, a sexy genius everyone is competing to impress and whose seminar is offered at the same time as Mac's restaurant shift. Since the poor girl is not only putting herself through school, but supporting her mother and sister, she desperately needs a fellowship Bethany seems to control. The narrative hopscotches between the challenges of grad school and the unfolding drama, 10 years later, in the SkyLoft Hotel. Mac sends Harvard up to her room by himself and steps out of the elevator to waylay Gwen. They have a heart-to-heart during which Mac gets blackout drunk and wakes up unable to remember just how much she confessed about some terrible incident in the past: suspense by alcohol. As the story races to its conclusion, a racism issue with another student is needlessly tacked on and believability is tossed to the winds.
A tense psychological thriller with an intriguing setup but too many far-fetched twists at the end.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-12654-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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