Hawkins manages to achieve the seemingly impossible: A Frankenstein-inspired novel that feels both fresh and unique.
Past and present collide when two old friends spend a summer writing at an infamous villa in Italy.
After a tough year, Emily Sheridan needs a change. Enter Chess Chandler, her best friend since childhood, the golden girl who has become effortlessly famous for her self-help books and her glamorous Instagram posts and who has rented an Italian villa for the summer—a villa famous not only as a luxury retreat, but as the scene of a 1970s murder. Hawkins then turns the narrative over to the people who inhabited the villa that tragic summer—particularly a young woman writer who finds the inspiration to write a seminal work of horror; her hapless, brilliant husband; and the cruel, famous young aristocrat who drew them all there. It takes barely a page for the allusions to become apparent: This is a reimagining of the famous summer of 1814, when Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron held a ghost story contest from which Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was born. The novel continues to cut from the summer of 1974 to the present, as Emily begins to recapture her own power and imagination as a writer—even as she discovers that Chess may not be the friend she appears to be. Though the introduction of the major players of 1974 (Mari Godwick, Pierce Sheldon, Noel Gordon, etc.) feels rather heavy-handed, the characters quickly take on a fascinating life and energy that elevates them from being mere copies of the historic Romantics. And while the operatically tragic characters of the 1970s are ultimately more intriguing than Chess and Emily and their (mostly) petty dramas, Hawkins casts a sharp eye throughout to the way we construct stories about female artists—and the moral ambiguity inherent in creation and fame. The effect lingers like a shadow, or a creature, that endures past the final words.
Hawkins manages to achieve the seemingly impossible: A Frankenstein-inspired novel that feels both fresh and unique.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2502-8001-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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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