A trim, gripping, casually brutal small-town epic.
The National Defense Agency investigates murder and corruption in this Midwestern noir.
Early one morning, Grace Abernathy walks her dog in Mercy Creek, Iowa. She lets the collie off his leash in Peterbo County Park, and he begins sniffing around some maintenance sheds. In a poorly covered grave, the dog finds five bodies. The victims are a local group of friends—Pat Green, Susan Grisel, Mike Belmont, PhilipRichards,and Billy Cannon—who worked for R&G Construction. When media outlets report on the mass grave, Henry Granger, CEO of R&G, grows concerned. His company, which trucks guns and drugs along Interstate-35 toward Mexico, had been trying to eliminate a mole. Granger answers to Mr. Juarez in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, who must now be reassured that his American partners are competent. The murder victims included an undercover FBI agent. The National Defense Agency sends Capt. KD Thorne and Warrant Officer Jeffery Blunt to run a “parallel investigation” of Mercy Creek’s law enforcement and discover corruption. When the agents arrive, Sheriff James Crowder cooperates fully despite being on Granger’s payroll. The sheriff’s son, Jimmy, was the only member of the group of friends working for R&G left alive. Jimmy suspects a coverup and only wants justice. Can Thorne and Blunt use him to expose Mercy Creek’s violent underside? This second volume of King’s KD Thorne series is a ballet of tension and rough justice. A journalistic lens captures small-town America’s downward slide, as the economically vulnerable Mercy Creek needs R&G’s warehouse to survive. Thrilling escalation begins as Granger tries to apply pressure to the determined agents. Thorne is barely fazed when his goons kidnap and torture her, describing it as being “rode hard, put away wet.” Blunt, a Black agent, feels an extra touch of horror when a deputy pulls over the protagonists’ car. Knowing it’s a setup, he tells Thorne: “I’m going to do my best to keep from being killed.” In the final third, morally gray characters deliver satisfying moments, and the author’s winning agents go big to prove they can’t be trifled with. A sweet closing scene brings these action heroes back down to Earth.
A trim, gripping, casually brutal small-town epic.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952711-09-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Blurred Lines Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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