A juicy mystery filled with gossip—and music you can almost hear.
While a singer-songwriter is striving to produce an authentic-sounding album, her best friend from high school is found at the bottom of a lake—dredging up the tragedy behind the music.
Dylan Read is a mega-selling, Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter whose country roots have evolved into a sort of “bedroom pop” that fans love for its personal and—although she doesn’t like the word—confessional nature. But despite her best efforts, the media accuse her of being fake. In a news article about the cold case of a girl who went missing 15 years ago, the headline gives the detail that Kelsey Copestenke was a classmate of Dylan’s, seemingly milking the flimsy connection between the two for the sake of getting more page views. But what Dylan hasn’t told the press—or even her publicist—is that she owes her career to Kelsey. Beneath the veneer of her success are the people who know Dylan’s secrets: the high school classmates; Kelsey’s brother, Matt; and the boyfriend she hides from the world for fear it’ll wreck their relationship and her career. But one secret is a mystery: what happened to Kelsey. As Dylan goes through each album of her catalog, she flashes back to her high school years in upstate New York with her lost friend, who was forming a musical duo with Dylan when she went missing. “Country music is about relatability,” Dylan says. “Just three chords and the truth, as the saying goes. Pop, on the other hand, traffics in fantasy.” In the story, there’s a balance of both. The flashbacks are entertaining and filled with cringey high school drama. On the less relatable end, Dylan still frets about what the press says about her. But what makes her most interesting is Layden’s respect for the craft of making music, from Dylan’s “fear that tortilla chips might scratch my vocal cords” to Kelsey’s early guitar lessons: “We’re gonna learn four chords and six strumming patterns and you’re gonna have to trust me when I tell you that’s all you need to know.”
A juicy mystery filled with gossip—and music you can almost hear.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780063315099
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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
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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