A deeply intelligent and humorous examination of an anthropomorphized animal kingdom.
A retired lawyer who is murdered and reincarnated as a feral cat must find a way to bring his killers to justice in Stewart’s paranormal thriller.
After 35 years as a criminal defense attorney, William Hawkins retires to the small town of Crow River, hidden in the Canadian boondocks. After his wife Clare dies from cancer, William’s friendship with his neighbor Sandy deepens—she too is wrestling with cancer so painfully debilitating that she chooses to die by assisted suicide. However, before her procedure, she sees William brutally murdered and is then murdered herself, as she is the sole witness to the crime. Then, in a bizarre turn of events almost rendered plausible in this delightfully strange novel, William is reincarnated into a feral cat’s body. William (that’s a human name, so as a cat he either goes by Hawk or Buddy), desperate to solve his own murder, cutely charms his way into the home of his daughter, Jules, a police officer. She doesn’t know William is dead—his body has mysteriously vanished. He types out messages to her on his cell phone with his surprisingly nimble paws, both to get information about the investigation and send her some of his own when he comes upon it. The author constructs a remarkably complex animal world with its own moral code and laws, which William must navigate. It’s not entirely unlike the human one, except for the fact that the “animal world is always at war,” and so allowances must be made for the naturalness of predation. Such a fantastical tale can easily go off the rails into the absurdly contrived or the cloyingly saccharine—the protagonist is a kitten, after all—but Stewart manages to avoid both of these pitfalls. The result is a very funny and inventive novel that manages to achieve something rare: a glimmer of authentic originality.
A deeply intelligent and humorous examination of an anthropomorphized animal kingdom.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781069057907
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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