by Mike Florio ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2024
A fast-paced mob-family saga with compelling characters, great dialogue, and hardboiled vengeance.
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In Florio’s crime novel set in the 1970s, gangsters pursue a young couple and fight among themselves.
As the story opens, it’s 1973 and J.J. Mesagne has just fled the scene of a gangland shootout in Wheeling, West Virginia, involving his father. He travels across the country with a stolen dog named Gnocchi to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he meets up with his mother, Maria Jenkins, and Leslie Fitzpatrick, the girl carrying his baby. Leslie also happens to be the mistress of Paul Verbania, West Virginia’s main mob boss. The three soon learn that J.J.’s father has been executed as a reprisal for the couple’s relationship. J.J. assumes a false name and starts working at a hospital in an effort to keep a low profile, but it isn’t long before he arouses the suspicions of Billy, a local man with organized crime connections. Before long, J.J. realizes he must decide between doing the unthinkable or continuing to run. Back in West Virginia, Paul’s crew, led by the menacing Vinny, are taking the search national: Anyone who finds J.J., and sends his severed hand to them as proof that he’s dead, will receive a sizable reward. Meanwhile, Jimmy Dacey, the 72-year-old best friend of J.J.’s father, is infiltrating the West Virginia mob; he starts working with Vinny’s crew and learns that there’s dissension in the ranks over whether to keep pursuing J.J. Jimmy hatches a plan to take down the bad guys and set J.J. free for good.
Over the course of the novel, Florio presents a mob drama that spans years before delivering a satisfying conclusion that ties all the various plot threads together. Right from the exciting opening—which starts in the middle of the action, leaving readers unsure of who was just shot, whom we should trust, or what exactly is in J.J.’s immediate future—readers will be eagerly turning pages as Florio fills them in on past and future events. The cast of characters is large, and several are the focus of individual chapters, told from their first-person point of view. This device could have offered an intriguing patchwork of perspectives, but it’s not entirely successful in its execution; they often feel too similar in style, and the cutting back-and-forth between different points of view slows some exciting action sequences. Despite this, Florio’s characters are well drawn and engaging. He has a flair for dialogue that keeps the plot moving, as in punchy exchanges between Vinny and his dimwitted crew, or between J.J. and his sharp-tongued mother, as when he tells her it’s his duty to get revenge: “‘Duty my ass.’ Maria smacked a hand against her backside as she said it. ‘Your only duty is to take care of this family. If you don’t come back, where does that leave us?’” The plot treads familiar territory for the genre, but the inclusion of Maria and Jimmy as elders with their own agendas, romances, and doubts feels fresh.
A fast-paced mob-family saga with compelling characters, great dialogue, and hardboiled vengeance.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798987944042
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PFT Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Mike Florio
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by Mike Florio
by Freida McFadden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 2025
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
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by Freida McFadden ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 2025
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
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