If only the FBI didn’t fly its agent everywhere by private jet, she’d be sitting atop a mountain of frequent flyer miles.
Special Agent Daniela Vega of the FBI goes hunting for a most unusual treasure.
Though Gustavo Toro was a highly professional hit man, he had a conscience, and when he’s betrayed and murdered on orders from his latest employer, he turns out to have left a surprising legacy: an encrypted video meant to be watched by the FBI director in which he reveals that he’s squirreled away details on his long history of murders for hire and hopes that the authorities will find that information and put it to good use. Because he was concerned that this trove might fall into the wrong hands, though, Toro made it exceptionally difficult to find, and when Dani is given the job of uncovering it, every clue she follows seems to lead to a dead end or a dead informant because “someone is cleaning house.” Along the way, Dani’s campaign against the murky Exmyth Technologies leads to a turf war between Special Agent in Charge Steve Wu, head of the FBI’s New York office of counterterrorism, and Scott Hargrave, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York office, with Dani caught in the middle. At length a lead sends Dani to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine in Arizona, where she finds the crucial lead she needs. Even then, however, the author and the crime lords she’s created continue to spark so many violent new complications that Dani constantly has to call on her training as a U.S. Army Ranger. She longs to wrap up the case, which takes quite a while to wind down even after the climax, and get back to the business of helping her mother emerge from the fog that’s kept her in Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward for the past 10 years.
If only the FBI didn’t fly its agent everywhere by private jet, she’d be sitting atop a mountain of frequent flyer miles.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781662515835
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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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