Great action in a colorful setting. This is fun!
The fifth Arliss Cutter thriller builds to breakneck speed over the Alaskan countryside.
Supreme Court Justice Charlotte Morehouse visits Alaska for a conference and is invited to stay and see some of the sights. “My idea of wild adventure is a foreign film with subtitles,” muses a nervous law clerk. “What if something were to happen?” As bad luck would have it, Russian mobster Maxim Volkov bears a deep grudge against the justice. “My plan is simple,” he says. “Kill the bitch judge who let my Nina die.” The veteran of Penal Colony Number 6 has earned his nickname, Kostolom—Bone Breaker—but now he’s dying and wants to avenge his ex-wife in the most public way possible. Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Arliss Cutter and Lola Teariki, his partner, are assigned to help protect Morehouse. The story reaches as far north as Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow, and is filled with local color to spark the imaginations of armchair travelers. Key to the action is the Alaska Railroad, which tourists normally ride to soak in hundreds of miles of magnificent scenery. Alas, the train is a confined space where the good, the bad, and the innocent have nowhere to go unless they jump off and risk death. Author Cameron is perhaps best known for his Tom Clancy novels, but the Arliss Cutter series looks equally good. Cameron himself was a U.S. marshal specializing in dignitary protection in the 1990s, eventually retiring as district chief in Alaska, giving him serious chops to write this appealing series. His hero, Arliss, is a sympathetic pro not given to smiles or trust, perhaps because of his brother Ethan’s death, which might have been murder. Ethan had also been married to the woman Arliss has loved since youth, so there are levels of pain. “I'm not in the trusting business,” he says. “I'm in the hunting-bad-men business.” The bad guys are a lot less nuanced—those Russki ruffians are flat-out evil as Volkov prepares his son to take over his criminal enterprise. But to kill Morehouse they'll have to get past some tough U.S. marshals.
Great action in a colorful setting. This is fun!Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781496737618
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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