Despite the valedictory elements, Perry makes the distant past as vivid and immediate as the relentlessly paced present.
Nine years after his comeback appearance in The Informant (2011), the Butcher’s Boy returns yet again, and for the usual reason: Because somebody’s trying to kill him.
Michael Schaeffer, as he’s been calling himself now for many years, hardly breaks a sweat dispatching the four hit men who break into his aristocratic wife’s Yorkshire home. But an old pro like him realizes they’re only the tip of an iceberg, and when his flight to Australia merely makes him the target of a completely new crew of assassins, he realizes that the only way to end such a serpentine plot is to cut off its head. Breaking cover to drop in uninvited on Elizabeth Waring, the Justice Department Organized Crime official who still dreams of turning him into an informant, he learns one fact that could explain why he’s suddenly become a person of interest to both feds and organized crime once more: the impending parole hearing of Carlo Balacontano, a career criminal convicted in 1982 of the rare murder he didn’t commit. The Butcher Boy, hired by Bala for a routine hit and then placed in the crosshairs by his client because Bala didn’t care to pay him, killed Bala's frontman, Arthur Fieldston, and then took exceptional pains to frame Bala for the crime. Has his former client been waiting all these years for revenge? Or are the folks at Justice taking advantage of his possible parole to turn up the heat on Michael Schaeffer? Either way, many more brutally efficient executions are guaranteed. The biggest surprise here is the number of extended flashbacks to the Butcher Boy’s apprenticeship to (who else?) the Butcher.
Despite the valedictory elements, Perry makes the distant past as vivid and immediate as the relentlessly paced present.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5777-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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