A first-rate addition to the subgenre of Threatened Men Acting Stupidly.
An 11th-grade teacher declared a national hero for saving his Connecticut school from an armed invader is knocked down several pegs by an unexpected lawsuit and a blackmail scheme.
The instructor, Richard Boyle, successfully talks a former student in a dynamite vest out of carrying out his planned grudge killings only to see him trip over a shoelace as he turns to go and blow himself up. The attacker’s parents sue Richard, charging he didn’t do enough to save their son. Richard is not on the greatest terms with parents, who are already unhappy with him for teaching their kids about cannibalism via Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. But this turns out to be the least of Richard’s worries after another one-time student, a misfit drug dealer looking to capitalize on Richard’s celebrity, demands $10,000 not to tell everyone that the teacher fondled him as coach of the wrestling team. Richard’s desperate efforts to avoid the false charge only draw him in deeper, eventually linking him to a murder and threatening his marriage. “I think the only thing we can accuse Richard of is being an idiot,” says his sister-in-law, a police officer. Though the book has one glaring red herring and one saw-that-coming plot twist, Barclay makes up for those missteps with his perfectly pitched treatment of topical subjects including school violence, book censorship, and the gun violence epidemic. When the drug dealer’s girlfriend asks him where he got his gun, “He rolled his eyes. ‘Lucy, this is America.’” It’s not clear why Richard’s narration is in the first person and everyone else’s is in the third. But Barclay, one of crime fiction’s most reliable stars, makes that approach, and much more in this page-turner, work.
A first-rate addition to the subgenre of Threatened Men Acting Stupidly.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780063276314
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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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