A tense, entertaining terrorist-on-the-run action yarn.
The manhunt for an assassin stretches around the world in Aithal’s twisty debut thriller.
The story unspools from a Taliban plot to assassinate Terence Collins, a Republican congressman from California who’s introduced a bill in 2021 to reinvade Afghanistan. Talib, an Afghan American man who’s the Taliban’s top agent on the West Coast, is assigned the hit; he duly kills Collins with a sniper shot from a yacht anchored near the congressman’s seaside mansion. Using his considerable criminal guile, mastery of disguise, and the stolen identity of a heart surgeon named Ramesh Kumar, Talib flees to Mumbai, India, on his way to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pursuing him is Newport Beach Police Department Detective Tony Ramirez, assisted by telecommunications surveillance of the National Security Agency and by Inspector Sunil Deshpande of the Mumbai police. Ramirez, whose mother, Simran, is Indian and who speaks a smattering of Hindi, ends up in India himself, where he catches up with family and launches himself onto Talib’s trail. Aithal, the author of Beyond the Milky Way (2015), fleshes out this simple chase narrative with reams of intricate procedural details. The chapters from Talib’s third-person point of view regale readers with the nerve-wracking minutiae of the killer’s preparation and practice, disposal of evidence, use of makeup and disguises, and so on. (Readers also see the sneaky online ploys that the Taliban uses to radicalize Talib.) Tony’s sleuthing also features nifty moments, including a brute-force investigation of a day’s worth of airline passengers from Los Angeles to Mumbai. There are some effective scenes of violence, but most of the action is in the labyrinthine calculations of the adversaries, conveyed with chilling aplomb by Aithal’s punchy, hard-boiled prose: “He could have quickly put a bullet between his eyes and stuffed his body in the trunk of the Toyota….It would take at least 16 to 20 hours before the stench was noticeably pungent.” The result is a page-turner that offers suspense with real psychological depth.
A tense, entertaining terrorist-on-the-run action yarn.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-84045-634-7
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
