This smashing espionage tale kicks off what promises to be a smart, indelible series.
In this debut novel, a CIA attorney tries to elicit a murder confession from the man who recruited him into the agency.
When a bomb blows up Charlie March and his yacht in 1991, the dying CIA officer in his last few words utters the name Nathan. The agency quickly sends legal counsel Russell Aiken to interview Nathan Muir at the Florida island home he rents every September. The two men have a strong connection: Muir recruited Aiken years ago. As for March, he recruited Muir from the Marine Corps in 1950s South Korea. Muir, who claims he didn’t kill March, talks about working for his mentor, including hunting a spy in Korea. Yet Muir’s history teems with sordid details and secrets, from his reputed discovery that March had “gone bad” to his fallout with Tom Bishop, another CIA recruit and field officer. But it turns out that Aiken has also been involved in some unsavory deeds, such as using his skills to help Muir jump legal hurdles. As Muir’s decadeslong chronology inches closer to what Aiken hopes is a confession, the CIA operations officer has a bevy of surprises for the attorney. TV/film writer Beckner’s riveting series opener takes characters from a Hollywood script he penned—the Tony Scott–directed Spy Game (2001). The author packs this epic narrative with plot turns and real-world events, such as the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The cast is also multilayered, especially Muir, Aiken, and Bishop. Aiken, for example, has struggled with alcoholism and just found out his wife is cheating on him. The novel, primarily encompassing the crucial interview, is relentlessly tense, as Muir knows things that should stay hush-hush and certainly tells lies at least some of the time. He’s both debonair and chilling and drops such memorable one-liners as “We’d go where the Cold War blows.” The open ending offers a thorough resolution as well as more than one shocker.
This smashing espionage tale kicks off what promises to be a smart, indelible series.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985597400
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Montrose Station Press LLC
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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