He'd be a rom-com hero if not for the woman tied up in his house—a twisted premise that raises unexpected moral questions.
While a widowed man falls for a bartender, the woman he’s held hostage for years plots her escape in this fast-paced thriller.
Aidan Thomas doesn’t seem like a bad person: “People loved and trusted him because he was a normal man.” When his wife dies and he needs to move, his hostage, a woman he calls Rachel, convinces him to move her into his new house under the guise of being his tenant rather than killing her in the shed where he’s been hiding her. There, she has more access to his life—she can look through his possessions, hear who comes into the home, and even talk to his daughter. In alternating chapters, she figures out how to stay alive and how best to try to leave. The tight clip of Rachel’s voice—“Any minute now, the tires of his truck will screech outside. He’ll climb up the stairs, the furious tap-tap-tap of his boots a prelude to his anger”—lends urgency. Meanwhile, Aidan is so popular that his community is raising money for him in a 5K race; bartender Emily has volunteered to run a hot-cocoa station to get to know him better. It’s the contrast between the man Aidan appears to be to the outside world—and even to his family—and the man he is in secret that makes Rachel’s job so difficult. The people who love him will protect him because they can’t see him the way that she does. In other chapters, Aidan’s earlier victims chime in to show what’s at stake for Rachel if he isn’t caught. And when Rachel meets the other women in his life—first his daughter and then Emily—she knows she must escape for their sakes, too, but will they help or hinder her?
He'd be a rom-com hero if not for the woman tied up in his house—a twisted premise that raises unexpected moral questions.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780593534649
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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