If you can swallow the outrageous premise, Maldonado keeps the plot boiling and the bodies dropping to the end.
Ever wanted to try out an escape room but been stopped by your own claustrophobia? Here’s the perfect substitute.
Alertly spotting the fatal poisoning in progress of Nathan Costner, chief of staff to Sen. Thomas Sledge, on a New York street, FBI agent Daniela Vega pursues the assassin but loses him in the crowd. Luckily, he’s soon identified anyway as Gustavo Toro, a killer for hire whom Dani’s boss, Special Agent in Charge Steve Wu, nabs and cuts a deal with that depends on Toro’s passing Dani off as his romantic and professional partner when he reports back to his paymaster, Col. Xavier Treadway, who’s said that he needs him for a big new operation. There’s a new operation all right, but it’s one in which Treadway is just another pawn, not a king. Someone calling himself Nemesis has lured 12—with the addition of Dani, 13—killers into a vast and isolated structure rife with dangers and promised that only one of them will make it out alive. “This was not entertainment,” Dani tells herself. “People’s lives were at stake.” But she’s doubly wrong, not only because she’s a character talking about other characters in a novel, but because a virtual version of the helpless killers’ attempt to escape from their elaborate trap by collaborating with each other when they must and killing each other when they can is streaming in real time for an audience that includes the FBI, the NYPD, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and Dani’s kid sister and brother, who each bring something extra to the party.
If you can swallow the outrageous premise, Maldonado keeps the plot boiling and the bodies dropping to the end.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781662507830
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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