Brisk, terse, and diverting.
Thwarting what seems like a run-of-the-mill holdup thrusts an ex-Marine into an international cybercrime plot.
What seems simple and predictable turns complex and surprising in this thriller, the sixth in the Peter Ash series. The swiftly paced, action-dominated plot rushes headlong from its outset. Freelance journalist June Cassidy alerts series protagonist Ash to a bearded and “weird-looking dude” as she, Ash, and his sidekick, Lewis, meet for an outdoor coffee near the Milwaukee Public Market on a sunny October afternoon. The bearded man of interest holds up another man with an assault rifle and Ash tries to intervene. Ash momentarily throws the gunman off with two well-tossed honeycrisps, but not before the gunman takes a phone from his quarry and then escapes on an electric bike, leaving behind a pair of shades. “You don’t steal a phone with an AK-74,” Ash says, his curiosity about the incident compelling him to find out what the attacker was up to. Ash works with handicaps. An ex-Marine veteran of the Iraq War, he suffers from PTSD. Worse, the FBI wants him for the murder of a government employee Ash didn’t commit, so the shaggy-haired Ash must work out of police sight. Ash doesn’t work alone. Cassidy joins him, bringing keen investigative reportorial skills to the pursuit that do as much to solve the case as Ash and Lewis do with their athletics—this turns out not to be the macho-male dominated thriller it first seems to be. When the house Ash and Cassidy share is burgled, the sunglasses from the crime scene go missing. Then Cassidy is menaced by a thug in a van. To find out what they’ve stumbled on, they traverse the city, which Petrie describes sharply. The pair grab at straws—sharply sketched characters with seemingly tangential connections to the case—until a source offers a major clue: The holdup near the market may be connected to a Russian hacking attempt.
Brisk, terse, and diverting.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-53547-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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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