Nugent hits exactly the right tone of empathy and optimism, but she can’t fully banish the darkness.
Sally Diamond is beginning to connect with the world after having lived an isolated life with her late father. Will she be able to escape the shadows of her traumatic past and their echoes in the present?
Sally’s father, a psychiatrist, diagnosed her as “socially deficient,” so although she’s 42, she’s always lived with him outside the small Irish village of Carricksheedy. He'd always said that she should “put [him] out with the trash” when he dies, so when it happens, she tries to burn his body in their incinerator. In the flurry of public attention that follows, ranging from concern about Sally’s ability to function on her own to outraged theories that she must have murdered her father and was trying to dispose of the evidence, a secret about Sally’s past is revealed. While she'd always known she was adopted, she didn’t realize that she was the child of Denise Norton, who was kidnapped at age 11 and brutalized for 14 years. By the time Denise and Sally were rescued from their captor, Denise was so traumatized that she took her own life. So in addition to coming to grips with her adoptive parents’ roles—her father was the doctor treating her and Denise all those years ago, and her mother was the nurse—she also begins to process the truth about her biological parents. With the support of her therapist and her friends, Sally begins to step outside her constricted life, all the while keeping her eyes open for any sense of threat after she receives a mysterious gift in the mail. Nugent also begins to weave in flashback chapters from the perspective of a young boy being raised by a father who has a woman locked up in a single room. Between these chapters and Sally’s exploration of her past, this tragic, disturbing story of generational trauma eventually unspools. Despite the grim subject matter, Sally is an appealing character—strange, yes, but also engagingly literal.
Nugent hits exactly the right tone of empathy and optimism, but she can’t fully banish the darkness.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781501189715
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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