Familiar tropes folded into a visceral thriller.
In a sleepy Wisconsin town, one girl is gone, two more brutally murdered.
As medical examiner Rowan Winthorp scrutinizes the corpse of teenager Madison Caldwell, she reflects on her 18 years in the “purgatory” of grim Black Harbor, Wisconsin. Madison, the best friend of Rowan’s daughter, Chloe, has been found strangled to death in a gully. Repeated attempts to contact Chloe fail, and Rowan comes to the slow realization that her daughter is missing. Morrissey’s second Black Harbor thriller drops the gothic trappings of her debut and goes straight for the jugular, with gruesome twists and intimations of menace from every quarter. Libby Lucas, a strange teenager who dabbles in taxidermy, harbors several secrets related to the murder. Ditto neighborhood hottie Reeves Singh, who was Madison’s boyfriend. Chloe’s father, Axel, a veteran homicide detective in Black Harbor’s police department, angrily charges into the probe of his daughter’s disappearance. The investigation takes a deeply unsettling turn when it appears that Chloe was being bullied by Madison and may have had an affair with her drama teacher, Mark Cutler, who’s also gone AWOL. Both parents are left to reflect on the recent changes in Chloe’s personality they’ve mostly ignored. A second teen victim raises the specter of a serial killer. The deeper Rowan and Axel dig, the more creepy characters they unearth on their way to a grisly solution. While the core crime thriller packs a chilling wallop, the anxiety and soul-searching of the parents lacks both depth and verisimilitude, comporting uneasily with the serial killer’s extreme violence.
Familiar tropes folded into a visceral thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781250872340
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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