An unsettling, nightmare-inducing morsel from a master of suspense.
An expecting couple’s whirlwind summer trip to reconnect with family unravels into something like a game of cat and mouse.
It’s no spoiler to say that Jed and Jacy’s trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to visit Jed’s father, Dr. Ash, doesn’t go as expected. Jacy, as first-person narrator, is not afraid to drop hints that all is not well in Jed’s childhood home despite the happy reason for the trip—celebrating the newlyweds’ pregnancy news. After a lucid dream in a roadside motel, Jacy suggests “we could go back and just explain it wasn’t a good time. Not with the baby coming.” How different things could have been. Instead, the couple pushes on, their nervous excitement brimming. “It was tempting fate, though, wasn’t it? I see that now,” says Jacy, a couple days into the visit and growing more aware. Dr. Ash shows a touching interest in Jacy’s well-being, an eye always on her belly. It’s only natural that Jed’s mother would come up. She died in childbirth, Dr. Ash reveals. “Had Jed told me this and I’d missed it?” Jacy wonders. This is the first crack in the family facade, a chip in the paint that reveals layers of history underneath. The voice of Jacy’s own mother rings in her head—“Honey…we all marry strangers.” Lurking in the background is Mrs. Brandt, the Ash household’s longtime caretaker. Her formal nature suggests a strong loyalty to Jed’s family. “It’s hard enough seeing you,” Mrs. Brandt says. “Pregnant, fulsome. Fecund, ripening.” This ability to twist a good thing inside out until it feels shameful is classic Abbott. Jacy’s belly is suddenly a trigger, the inevitability of birth like a bomb waiting to go off. Unease turns to discomfort turns to fear when Jacy wakes up bleeding one morning, and suddenly her body no longer feels like her own. Jacy wants to leave, but Dr. Ash wants her to do what’s best for the baby. Who gets to decide? And what about Jed? Compared to Jacy, Jed reads like a ghost of a person, flat on the page. But maybe that’s the point given this is Jacy’s story to tell. Abbott masterfully uses the pretext of a pregnant woman’s heightened senses—“I could smell everything now…even the carpet glue, the wood paste in the staircase post”—to build a claustrophobic atmosphere of mistrust and insecurity reminiscent of Get Out. You’re sure to get chills.
An unsettling, nightmare-inducing morsel from a master of suspense.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780593084939
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
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
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