A rousing, suspenseful crime drama with memorable characters.
An Arizona teenager’s life becomes marred by betrayal and violence in this novel.
Joy’s tale chronicles the adolescent years of Joey Blade, a high school senior football star in Phoenix. His plucky ex-girlfriend Mallory Stewart encourages a reluctant Joey to go to Los Angeles to check out colleges for a sports scholarship despite discouraging words from his mother, Callie, and Vietnam veteran father, Dutch, who prefer he remain with the family’s lucrative engine rebuilding business. A bright future studying writing beckons. But first is a millennium-eve bonfire party where Joey celebrates his 18th birthday with new girlfriend Wendy Chang and her provocative pot dealer, TJ Grimes. What’s intended as a mostly innocent night turns solemn when Mallory reveals her pregnancy and the bonfire explodes, sending fiery embers into the crowd. Joey, Wendy, and TJ speed away. Unfortunately, after they are taunted by Wendy’s ex-flame Lawrence Darville on the road, TJ pulls a gun in a subsequent police shootout that finds Joey, the driver, tossed in jail. TJ disappears, and the ensuing months revolve around Joey dealing with the court proceedings, rekindling things with Mallory, and quelling the melodrama surrounding Wendy, who lied to the police about the gun’s owner. The effort to find TJ to clear Joey is expedited thanks to drug lord Chico Torres, whom Joey met in jail. In Joy’s novel, Joey emerges as a fully developed character to root for. His path to freedom doesn’t come easily, spanning the story’s second half, which depicts him as an adult with unfinished business. The author is careful never to allow the tale’s hard-won momentum to dissipate and is masterful at keeping all the plot pieces in motion as they play out. The raw, gritty lives of these teens are portrayed in an unadorned yet highly charged narrative in which trouble is plentiful. Joy is distinctly talented at characterization, especially with the convincing life of Joey, whose future is placed in jeopardy after some ill-conceived decisions. The author’s prose is crisply paced and lively. As he demonstrated in previous novels, Joy has a firm grip on how effective a solid combination of a strong storyline and a core cast of vivid, anchoring characters can be in a tale where youthful innocence becomes tarnished by consequences.
A rousing, suspenseful crime drama with memorable characters.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952782-51-0
Page Count: 342
Publisher: BQB Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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