Warning: serious violence against cats, who have a lot more to endure here than humans.
The disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student in 1897 threatens to unearth any number of unholy secrets.
Most of the other residents in Porter Hall have little to do with Bertha Mellish, whom they regard as unstylish, plain, and not especially sociable. Even her senior mentor, the glowing and polished Mabel Cunningham, has little to say about her. Only two people are really close to Bertha: her much older sister, Florence, a schoolteacher back in Killingly, Connecticut, where they both grew up; and Agnes Sullivan, a fellow student who’s notably gifted at drawing but who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Unlike anyone else at Mount Holyoke, Agnes knows everything there is to know about Bertha—maybe even, as Beutner hints early on, what happened to her when she vanished from campus. When someone identified as Bertha Miller is reported to have been seen in a neighboring town, Bertha’s father, Rev. John Hyrcanus Mellish, goes to check her out but forbids Florence to accompany him. Later, Florence will go herself to identify the body of a young woman who’s been fished from a nearby lake. Both leads are dead ends, leaving it uncertain whether Bertha’s vanishing was connected to a series of petty thefts at the college; to Joseph Poirier, the unsavory millworker she’d taken up with; or to her home life back in Killingly. Beutner’s decorous prose effectively establishes a hothouse atmosphere, but the suspense endures without ever quickening, and after a shocking revelation halfway through, the rest of the story, rooted in an unsolved real-life Mount Holyoke mystery, seems to wind down rather than winding up.
Warning: serious violence against cats, who have a lot more to endure here than humans.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781641294379
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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