An entertaining suspense yarn about complicated, success-driven women.
A New York City journalist investigates the duplicitous founder of a Silicon Valley biotech startup on the eve of its initial public offering in this contemporary novel.
At a conference in Manhattan, 28-year-old BusinessBerry journalist Jamie Roman alerts speaker Anna Bright, the 34-year-old founder of BrightLife—a California company developing BrightSpot, an intraocular biosensor lens with robust capabilities—that she has a hot mic after leaving the stage. Appreciative, Anna asks Jamie to do the BusinessBerry interview that Jamie’s boss was set to do and invites her on her private flight back to the West Coast. Anna, suffering from a headache, sleeps through the trip, but she reschedules the interview for after the weekend, allowing Jamie to spend time with Anna’s attractive assistant, Ian, and overhear gossip that BrightSpot isn’t ready for market. The narrative alternates between the women’s third-person perspectives as both handle challenges: Jamie, in addition to her reporting, competes with a male colleague for a promotion and deals with her estranged Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist father, and Anna keeps the truth from her board of directors and pushes employees to fix issues ahead of BrightLife’s looming IPO. As Jamie pursues a new investigative piece on BrightLife, her boss and, surprisingly, her father warn her to back off. Fans of the Hulu streaming miniseries The Dropout, about the scandal involving biotech company Theranos, will enjoy this page-turner by Schnall, who often concludes her characters’ sections with provocative cliffhanger teasers (“I don’t want to be the whistleblower—not because I don’t want to help you but because I know someone who knows way more than I do”). The author infuses a lot of fun and flavor into the narrative, as when griping employees call BrightSpot “BS,” and she gives Anna sympathetic shadings, despite her behind-the-scenes actions. Jamie, too, is a well-developed character beyond her reporting on BrightLife.
Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781684632527
Page Count: 344
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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