A tense, beautifully written page-turner with a truly unsettling denouement.
The murder of her cousin moves a Scottish woman to explore her past.
When her husband divorced her, Tabitha Lawson lost not only her marriage but her job, since he anonymously told her employer about a schizophrenia diagnosis she hadn’t revealed to them. Her son chose to live with his father; Tabitha moved in with her mother, Zelda, whose dark paintings give her nightmares. So do the dark waters of the loch she’s lived nearby most of her life. Her cousin Davey Muir, a coder and collector, and his friend Gordo spend a lot of time with Barrett, a divorced gardener with two teen girls, picking up litter near the loch. It’s all very routine until Gordo reports a mysterious underwater explosion at the loch, which is set to be drained and turned into parkland. When Davey doesn’t answer his door, Tabitha gets the police to investigate just as Barrett and Gordo arrive to find Davey dead. Although he’s left what looks like a suicide note, his friends can’t believe he’d kill himself. Neither can Tabitha, who’s inherited everything he owned. When she, Barrett, and Gordo clean out his house, which is packed to the rafters with junk, they start uncovering long-hidden family secrets. Tabitha and her sister, Jocasta, and Davey and his brother, Johnny, all grew up together, children of a pair of brothers who both died by suicide. The marriage of Jo and Johnny puts even more pressure on the turbulent family dynamics. Tabitha, Davey’s friends, and their teenage children launch an investigation that will reveal that everything Tabitha thought she knew about her childhood is based on false memories.
A tense, beautifully written page-turner with a truly unsettling denouement.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781448312078
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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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