Sowyak’s grasp of human hurt and healing deepens this terrifying novel’s lasting impact.
An emergency room nurse races against the clock to solve a kidnapping, a murder, and a medical mystery in Sowyak’s thriller.
Maggie Bennett runs the ER at Saint Vincent’s Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. On Christmas night, the hospital is shaken by a daring and violent robbery of narcotics that leaves one of Maggie’s coworkers dead, another with a life-threatening injury, and still another senselessly kidnapped. Having already survived an attack by a serial killer, Maggie knows that you can’t always follow the rules if you want to survive. She and her coworker Benny Maxwell break what they can’t bend as they hunt down the kidnapper of Willow, Benny’s wife, with the help of retired homicide detective Lamar Floyd and detective Mark Hanes, who seems to vacillate between admiring Maggie and accusing her of murder. Drawing on her experience as a registered nurse and as a medical advisor for feature films and TV series (including Law and Order), the author writes convincingly about the human condition as seen through the eyes of medical workers on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic. Procedurals have the advantage of convincing the reader of their verisimilitude while also lulling them with a false sense of order—a sense that, in time, every stone will be turned, every mystery will be solved, and everything will be understood. When the reader finally learns who’s behind the kidnapping of Willow, it becomes evident how deeply Sowyak understands characters caught up in violent relationships, and the resulting terror is utterly believable and chilling (“Blood flowed freely as she desperately looked around for a way out. There wasn’t one”). You don’t want to bet against Maggie, but the harrowing nature of the psychological and physical violence people visit upon each other in this outing makes one doubt even the comforting certainties of the procedural.
Sowyak’s grasp of human hurt and healing deepens this terrifying novel’s lasting impact.Pub Date: June 16, 2023
ISBN: 9798218228989
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
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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