An ambitious but melodramatic courtroom tale.
A scarred man goes on trial for the death of the woman he loved in this legal thriller.
Jack Holt is standing trial for rape and murder. The victim is Maggie Navarro Stewart, a world-famous model and millionaire who was trapped in an abusive marriage to gastroenterologist Daniel Stewart. Jack and Maggie met by chance one day in a park, and she saw something in the humble warehouse worker that no one had before. Jack still bears the scars—physical and emotional—from the childhood accident that killed his father and sisters. The disfigurement to his face has mostly kept him from love—until he met Maggie, that is. Then, one day, Maggie disappeared shortly after informing Daniel she wanted a divorce. She was soon found strangled to death. Police discovered Jack’s DNA on her person, and he did not help himself by refusing to talk to them. Now, he may be facing life in prison. Jack is given a public defender, the disgraced lawyer Joe Hammer. Joe used to be a great prosecutor before he was disbarred for withholding evidence. His wife left him after the incident, and he’s since been plagued with stomach disorders and sleeping problems. Defending Jack is his shot at redemption, and he means to do it by the book. Meanwhile, a jury of conflicting personalities is assembled to rule on the case. Most are ready to convict Jack, but a few holdouts force the jury to consider the alternative. The trial will prove a roller coaster for all involved, as new facts and surprise witnesses continue to alter the shape of the case. As the trial goes on, Jack increasingly escapes into his dreams, where he and the dead Maggie discuss the events that brought them there—and whether or not he should join her in the afterlife.
Elzey makes bold choices with the novel’s structure, leaping forward and backward in time and using dream sequences to fill in much of Jack’s and Maggie’s backstories. The prose is readable, but there is a draftlike quality to it that suggests a lack of editing. Here he takes three sentences to communicate the age of one character: “When I first saw my former boss, I couldn’t believe how old he had become. The man I hadn’t seen in many years had become a withered old man. The eighty-three-year-old judge with the help of a cane stood up to greet me.” Nearly every aspect of the story displays the same heavy-handedness. The dead Maggie is idealized while Jack has a saintly disinterest in the world. Neither feels much like a real character, and their relationship will be no more believable to readers than it is to the members of the jury. Racist juror Henry Keller is a cartoon version of a bigot, taking every opportunity to offend each person he comes in contact with. The author attempts to tie up these threads in a statement about the two different Americas—one of opportunity and one of imprisonment—but it’s all a bit too soapy to make an impact.
An ambitious but melodramatic courtroom tale.Pub Date: June 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73405-465-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Little House Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
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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