A grand postwar adventure that’s dramatic, flashy, and pleasantly offbeat.
A skilled assassin tries to rescue British troops being held by a sadistic baron after World War I in Harries’ latest installment of his Tales of the Sica thriller series.
In 1920, Leon Harries is one of the best professional killers the British secret service has; he’s descended from a clan of assassins whose history goes back 2,000 years, and he knows his talents are incomparable. Capt. Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, chief of the foreign branch of the British Secret Intelligence Bureau, has an important mission for him. The Great War has ended, Europe is in disarray, and the dastardly Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg has kidnapped and taken control of a group of British soldiers. As the captain tells Leon, “We are talking about a man with the ability to rise from the depths of depravity and land on a level of deviancy and debauchery that hasn’t fouled the earth since Attila the Hun.” Leon would rather call it a day and pass his prized sica, or dagger, on to another family member, but the British need their boys back, and the baron is planning on invading Mongolia. Enter Countess Catherine von Merenberg, granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II, who’s a skilled pilot. She flies Leon over Europe and Asia in 400-mile hops, dodging warlords and imminent doom, until they reach their target: the horrible baron. Harries’ historical adventure gets off to a slow start, with background information and cameos from real-life figures such as Winston Churchill filling too much space when a more streamlined approach to the complicated narrative would have worked much better. That said, the work delivers enough historical pomp and bombast to make the story engaging and, at times, hair-raising even as it remains fully grounded in the realities of a postwar world. Throughout, the author displays a notable knack for spinning a yarn, and his story of a just assassin in a world of power-hungry warriors is inventive and tirelessly imaginative.
A grand postwar adventure that’s dramatic, flashy, and pleasantly offbeat.Pub Date: April 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781950628186
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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