Deeply unsettling yet compulsively readable.
A horrific real-life quintuple murder in a sleepy French village inspired this novel.
What would it take to provoke extreme savagery in a seemingly normal person? This is the question Anna Guillot explores after her husband, Constant, kills five members of the Langlois family—Bakary, Sylvia, and their three children—in a fit of extreme rage. For a long time, the residents of the placid French village of Carmac haven't felt any real threats. They watched the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris at a remove, through televised media coverage. All that changes when Bakary Langlois arrives with his family. Not only is Bakary Black, he is also rich, a markedly different social class than most other Carmac residents. His custom-built chalet is a source of envy, especially for Constant, his neighbor. Anna narrates two stories: One looks back at her husband’s early days as a promising pole vaulter whose athletic dreams are crushed by a nasty accident while the other details the systematic resentment that builds in an already fractured Constant, whose perceived indignities are compounded when Anna finds work as a maid at the Langlois chalet. Then the cauldron of simmering resentment boils over when Bakary swindles Constant out of his parents’ life savings: 8,000 euros. In her first novel to be translated into English, Sedira packs a powerful punch, exploring the class-race divide through Constant, Anna, and the rest of the town’s residents. The graphic murders stand in stark contrast to Sedira's subtle accounting of Constant’s tortured path. At the center of the tragedy is complicity: Constant is never made to realize that a bad hand might be crippling but not reason enough to take it out on the perceived “other.”
Deeply unsettling yet compulsively readable.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313627-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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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