An often crafty whodunit laced with traditional elements of mystery and suspense.
A hard-driving assistant district attorney’s unflinching dedication to the law threatens the safety of her beloved daughter in Smith’s legal thriller.
Milwaukee assistant DA Rachel Elizabeth Matthews is the kind of tough-as-nails prosecutor who easily withstands the murderous threats from the punks she’s convicted as they're hauled off to jail. As Rachel proudly observes, she’s “immune” to that sort of thing. That immunity, however, comes at a price: Putting the law ahead of everything else in her life following the death of her daughter Charley’s father has slowly driven a wedge between Rachel and the struggling teen. Even Rachel’s widower father—the man who inspired her to follow him into the law—warns her that cold statutes are poor substitutes for warm human companionship. Beautiful blond socialite Olivia “Liv” Reid befriends Rachel at a gala event and asks to join her book club; Rachel obliges readily enough, largely due to her immediate desire to stick it to Liv’s overbearing and abusive husband, Zach. Rachel soon has more than Zach’s creepy come-ons and threatening overtures to manage: A stalker suddenly pops up in her life, seemingly determined to make her existence a living hell. But why? And who exactly is this stalker? The one thing she does know is that acting like “a rabbit on the run” is “no way to live.” Rachel decides to stop letting her stalker call the shots and instead “go after him for a change, maybe even set a trap.” But the no-nonsense ADA hasn’t always lived according to the letter of the law—Rachel’s got a skeleton in her closet that she’s desperate to keep hidden. Smith’s carefully unfolding exploration of the protagonist’s intricate psyche deftly parallels the rising action as ADA Matthews moves ever closer to unmasking the stalker’s true identity, while her taut, economical prose leaves plenty of room for the revelations to flow freely.
An often crafty whodunit laced with traditional elements of mystery and suspense.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Puzzle Box Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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