Well-developed female leads and loads of action and adventure make this a page-turning, if slightly predictable, read.
The first installment in Kulak’s new series is a thriller revolving around three female best friends and their attempt to rescue one of their own who becomes entangled with a sex trafficking ring.
Angie Hunter, Tiffany Knight, and Kaylee McDouglas have been close friends ever since childhood. Having grown up in Mount Miffsberg, the trio are still living in the town—and not exactly living the dream. Angie is a welder who moonlights teaching martial arts; Kaylee works at a sewage treatment plant, and Tiffany is a self-described “worthless stripper.” When Kaylee announces to her friends that she is engaged to a shady businessman from Bulgaria—and that she is traveling to the Balkans to meet her new fiance’s parents—Angie and Tiff know immediately that something isn’t right. After Kaylee’s text messages stop shortly after she arrives in Bulgaria, her two friends realize that she’s in danger. They don’t know where she is—or if she is even alive at all—so they travel to Bulgaria to investigate. Not knowing the language makes their mission difficult, but they befriend some locals—Og, a handsome bartender, and Dueza, a transgender woman with an intimate knowledge of the Bulgarian Mafia. They begin to piece together the tidbits of information. Kaylee’s fiance, it seems, is the head of a criminal organization that abducts women from all over the world and forces them into a life of sexual trafficking.
A healthy suspension of disbelief is needed here; the welder and her stripper friend take on and defeat, on numerous occasions, members of the Bulgarian mafia. The fight scenes, however, are well choreographed and believable, to an extent: “As soon as [Angie] had disabled his punching arm, she moved her quiet attention to his forward knee and kicked right through the tender cartilage, yielding a monstrous howl from the man. Elbow gone, knee gone. Not much he could do now except crumple to the floor. As he dropped, Angie pinched hard at the side of his neck until he fully passed out.” The humor is also a plus, making for some laugh-out-loud sequences. In one fight sequence, for example, Tiffany’s bout of explosive diarrhea helps to save the day: “Tiff couldn’t hold it any longer. She bent forward to let her colon relieve itself onto the lower half of Igor’s expensive suit.” But the real strengths here are twofold—the emotional connection and power of the three friends’ relationships and the thematic gravity of international sex trafficking. Kulak could’ve easily included gratuitous sex scenes to underscore the horrors of sexual slavery but, rightfully so, he only alludes to the brutality. The way the abductors treat women as objects, particularly American women, is terrifying enough: “We take America’s riches. The bitches are the riches.” The storyline does have minor issues, however, aside from the highly unlikely issue of two people going up against an entire crime syndicate. The overall ending concerning the three friends is a foregone conclusion—although the author does include a tantalizing twist that savvily leaves the door open for a natural sequel—and the description of Mount Miffsberg is underwhelming. The depiction of a rural American town could’ve had much a more thematic impact, but is only superficially explored.
Well-developed female leads and loads of action and adventure make this a page-turning, if slightly predictable, read.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781304213860
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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