LOCKED INSIDE

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.