Part The Club Dumas, part The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, all punk attitude and beautiful ache.
In a dystopian world of heavy fog, Nazi demonstrations, and a creeping virus, photographer Cass Neary searches for an ancient book that might have supernatural power.
Cass is a wreck. She’s lost her camera; she hasn’t heard from the love of her life, ex-con Quinn O’Boyle, in several days; and she’s jonesing for alcohol, speed, or anything else she can get her hands on. When she runs into rare-book runner Gryffin Haselton in London, he confesses that he’s about to make the sale of a lifetime to up-and-coming tech genius Tindra Bergstrand: a mysterious, arcane book that may have been written by Aristotle. Of course, things go horribly wrong: The middleman is murdered, and Cass and Gryffin escape only to be picked up by Tindra’s people. It turns out that Tindra wants the Aristotle text to scan into an app she’s developing that's supposed to heal the brains of people suffering from PTSD—but when Cass gets a glimpse of the Ludus Mentis app, she flashes back viscerally to the greatest trauma of her life. Reunited with Quinn, Cass is soon on the run, dodging neo-Nazis as they rally in London and following clues to a remote Scandinavian island, hoping that if she recovers the book it could pay her and Quinn’s way to a new start. Cass is walking wounded; still she views the world through the eyes of a true artist, an artist who feels the full weight of her calling. “Because what is a photographer,” she asks, “but a chooser of the slain, someone who decides who or what is destined for immortality?” Cass Neary is a tough, self-destructive character who still exudes compassion, courage, and love for the beauty and the pain of life—even more so because she recognizes its impermanence.
Part The Club Dumas, part The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, all punk attitude and beautiful ache.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-31648-593-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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