A virtuoso demonstration of how painful it is for a beleaguered heroine to suspect any of the people she trusts the most.
A suburban Connecticut teacher’s carefully curated life is shattered by a series of domestic invasions that increasingly seem connected to the estranged sister who’s returned to her home.
The same night that Kate Burke deflects her older sister Rebecca Wallace’s request to stay the summer in the cottage on Kate’s Westport property with the reminder that the terms of their grandfather’s will restrict Becca’s access to the off-season, Kate glimpses a pair of teenagers running from her yard. The intruders, it turns out, have cut down the swings in the backyard, taken a knife from Kate’s kitchen, and impaled it on the bedroom wall. Widowed by her husband Leif’s murder two years ago and feeling in acute need of protection for herself and her 12-year-old twins, Kate rents the cottage to Jack Guarnere, a conveniently returning relation of police chief James O’Neil’s wife—and then, when the twins’ regular babysitter has a sudden conflict, is in the awkward position of begging Becca to come east from Colorado, stay in Kate’s house, and help care for Max and Callie. Her reunion with Becca, whom she’d sent away after Leif’s death, goes as well as can be expected, but the violations of her privacy continue in the form of cryptic texts, a note on her car’s windshield, a rock thrown at her living room window, and a compromising photo shared with her school superintendent. No sooner has her high school classmate Eddie Sabrowski, Leif’s colleague and best friend on the police force, working independently of her father-in-law, former police chief Leo Burke, identified a suspect than things get worse. Much worse.
A virtuoso demonstration of how painful it is for a beleaguered heroine to suspect any of the people she trusts the most.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1001-6
Page Count: 445
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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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