The whole novel is worth it for the poignant beauty of the final paragraph.
A young man finds purpose when he becomes obsessed with saving two children from their abusive father.
Hardy “Hardly” Reed isn’t really living his best life, though he begins his story by saying, “I have everything I need and want.” Working as the Dead Sheriff at Haunted Frontier amusement park and smoking a lot of weed can kill only so many hours of the day. His life changes when he sees two children with unmistakable cigarette burns on their bodies. His heretofore dormant investigative skills lead him to make a report to Child Protective Services, then to interview the girls’ elementary school teacher. Along the way he finds unexpected help from a glamorous 40-something real estate agent, a “goth chick,” her metal-loving grandmother, and a teenager who “looks like a stick insect with braces.” In true noir fashion, Hardly is horribly beaten up, and from there his quest becomes an obsession—one he may even be willing to trade his whole life for. Hardly is a sad sack for sure, and it takes a while for him to earn all of our sympathy. His motivation is pure—who doesn’t want to save kids?—but he’s someone that things happen to rather than someone who makes things happen. It takes most of the novel for him to finally make some real decisions—and then, he does so with such single-mindedness that it feels like overcompensation. But that, of course, is one of Berney’s points: This novel is about a bland, dead-end white boy in a bland, dead-end (unnamed) Midwestern town who has learned to expect nothing from life but more of the same. Hardly’s trajectory is helped by Berney’s superb writing; sometimes self-consciously noir (“I look at a hand holding a gun. My hand. My gun”), sometimes just colorful (“A woman in front of me worries into her phone about a suspicious lump in her armpit”), it adds both gravity and grace to the protagonist’s stubborn, self-destructive path.
The whole novel is worth it for the poignant beauty of the final paragraph.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780062663863
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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