After a promising start, this debut ends up being all bark, no bite.
A floundering young woman gains access to a world of privilege through her mysterious new boyfriend.
Twenty-nine-year-old El is used to living on the fringes. She spent her teen years in Manhattan in a cramped apartment with her single mother and her mother’s best friend, sharing a bedroom with the friend’s son. She received financial aid to attend a prestigious private school filled with ultrarich students but had only tangential access to their lives of quiet luxury. Even now, El can’t break through in her career as an actor, instead working in a bakery and trying to figure out her next move. When El’s old classmate Julia unexpectedly offers an invitation to a party at her family’s East Hampton home, El can’t resist returning to that tony world, even for just one night. It’s there that El meets Bryce, a Cambridge graduate from a filthy rich family who is immediately, and intensely, taken with her. Though El isn’t particularly attracted to Bryce’s looks or personality, she’s attracted to what being with him brings—the life of ease and financial security she’s always wanted. When the two quickly move in together, El begins to lose touch with the world outside her relationship, quitting her job, dumping her roommate, and ghosting her friends—just as Bryce’s true nature starts coming to light. The author is deft at creating a tense atmosphere—complete with suspicious characters, sinister motivations, disturbing events, and an off-kilter narrator—that will keep readers turning the pages. But the lackluster conclusion strains credulity, and a symbolic thread that runs throughout the novel—dogs across the country are running away from and rebelling against their owners—is unsuccessful and, ultimately, has no bearing on the plot.
After a promising start, this debut ends up being all bark, no bite.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593715024
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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