A seriously playful novel of ideas.
As FitzSimmons already demonstrated in Constance (2021), it’s hard out there for a clone.
Five years ago, Palingenesis marketing chief Brett Harker’s two sons were kidnapped by bandits who demanded he turn over the company’s proprietary technology for human cloning—including information about how to implant the old body’s consciousness in the new clone. The negotiations left Marley Harker and his kid brother, Chance, dead to anyone who didn't have the cloning resources made available to a high-level executive of Palingenesis like his father. Now Chance is a fifth-generation clone who’s amused himself and amassed a string of social media followers ever since his return to life by engaging in a series of death-defying stunts that have repeatedly left him ripe for recloning. When an interview with prizewinning journalist Imani Zari Highsmith seriously damages his brand, Chance thinks the bottom has dropped out of his endless life cycle. But worse is still to come. He emerges from his latest memory revival to find LAPD Det. Val Wolinski about to arrest him for the murder of Lee Conway, an unemployed man he didn’t even know, and Palingenesis about to pull the plug on his unlimited access to clones, making his latest life his last. Although high-powered lawyer Sy Berger gets the murder charge dropped on a clone-specific technicality, Chance is still in hot water, and this time a troubling gap in his recent memory leaves him uncertain how much he can trust his girlfriend, former movie actress Maggie Soto, and even his now-divorced parents. FitzSimmons hooks readers with the clone angle and then expertly mixes SF and mystery tropes till he’s implicated every party in sight in some sort of crime or coverup.
A seriously playful novel of ideas.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781542009478
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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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