Deliverance in Vegas, with cinematic flourishes of violence and rough justice.
Four friends go on a gambling trip to Las Vegas and bring back more than they bargained for.
You’re minding your own business, and some rich guy’s wallet literally lands at your feet—what do you do? In 1984, Tommy Sullivan is sitting on a toilet in the men’s room of a casino when the man in the stall next to him drops his trousers, and his wallet spills out onto the floor. Tommy’s choice to snag the wallet and quickly leave the restroom nets him a significant amount of cash and some serious peril as the wallet’s owner, Fausto D’Angelo, a man operating on the edges of organized crime (“A damp, unlit cigar protruded from the left corner of his lips. He wore a tailored, blue three piece suit that probably fit him a year ago. Now the buttons of his vest strained against his ample belly”) seeks to identify the thief and get his money back—and then some. Tommy’s in Vegas with his little brother, Ricky, and two of their regular poker pals, Jared and Eric. They’re there ostensibly to celebrate Ricky graduating from the Boston Police Academy and beginning his new career as a police officer, and maybe to get him some real-life experience with women. Ricky’s naivete results in him falling for Jenny May, a similarly gullible stripper recently arrived from Tennessee. Tommy’s decision to take what’s not his puts all of their lives in danger, and the trouble follows them all the way back home to Boston (Fausto’s doesn’t adhere to the credo ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’). The author’s ear for accents, whether South Boston or East Tennessee, doesn’t translate well to the page, but his sense of the psychological stressors that influence each character’s moral decision-making, from mobster to record store clerk to bullying older brother to young Catholic cop, is pitch-perfect. The pacing is taut but not hurried; each character’s inner sense of right and wrong, balanced against their actions in the moment, keeps the novel barreling toward its inexorable showdown.
Deliverance in Vegas, with cinematic flourishes of violence and rough justice.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9798850642525
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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