A sometimes-dense but informative novel set in Communist Bucharest.
In LaFlash’s debut novel, a college student searches for her missing boyfriend in Communist Romania.
In 1957 Bucharest, medical student Virginia Gemanar has been dating her boyfriend, Jenica Cureteanu, for a year. They’ve always talked about going to see a concert at the city’s Athenaeum, and when Jenica calls to tell Virginia he’s scored tickets, she’s filled with excitement. When she goes to meet him the next day at a statue by the concert hall, however, he doesn’t show. She spends the rest of the day hanging out at the apartment of her friends Mircea and Doina, hoping that Jenica will appear. It doesn’t make sense for Jenica to have vanished—he isn’t connected to any criminals or anyone the police might consider subversive—but Virginia is still afraid to go to the authorities; ever since Romania joined the Warsaw Pact a few years earlier, the country has been run as a police state. “Jenica’s unexpected disappearance kept [Virginia] awake and wondering….The question so tormented her that she started thinking the worst, even the possibility that he might have been abducted and killed and that she would never see him again.” The next morning, Virginia heads to Jenica’s dorm to discover that several books are missing, and under his bed, she finds a suitcase filled with moldy notebooks. Strangest of all, the only person who claims to have seen Jenica recently—an ex-roommate—is behaving strangely and sporting a mysterious bruise. With no one to rely on except a few trusted pals, Virginia is forced to play the role of detective, sifting through clues and rumors to figure out just where Jenica went and if it’s possible to bring him back.
LaFlash, who grew up in Romania, immigrated to the United States in 1997 after the fall of Communism, and although her prose comes off as slightly awkward at times, it consistently reveals her deep knowledge of life in Bucharest under the Securitate, with plenty of specific detail: “Virginia’s heart sank. Almost everyone in Bucharest knew that the Jilava Penitentiary was one of the country’s largest and most dreaded….The army later converted it into a site for preventative and posttrial imprisonment for males who had been accused and found guilty of political crimes.” Over the course of the novel, one will find plenty of similarly expositional moments, which give the work as a whole a slightly didactic quality, as if the entire purpose of the plot were merely to dramatize this particular period in Romanian history. As a result, many of the characters in this narrative feel thinly drawn, and they reflect less moral ambiguity than readers might be expecting to find in people living under such difficult circumstances. Even so, the story’s mystery elements keep the plot consistently moving forward, and the reader will be just as anxious as Virginia to discover the fate of her missing boyfriend as her search takes her into a dangerous subterranean world of dissidents and secret police.
A sometimes-dense but informative novel set in Communist Bucharest.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-25460-9
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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