An extremely dark exploration of serial killing. Even an admirable final girl can’t balance the ick.
Wright explores the ravages of psychopathy on society through the lives of two young killers.
The Zanetti twins, Benjamin and Corinthia, are marked by violence from an early age, witnesses to their father committing a brutal murder. Both disgusted and fascinated by this traumatic event, they begin to take out a latent propensity for violence on animals. When Corinthia threatens to escalate by killing their younger brother, Ben intervenes and Corinthia is gravely hurt, which spurs their mentally ill mother to begin locking Ben in the basement. Ben and Corinthia eventually run away to live with their wealthy grandmother, whose kindness is not enough to undo years of abuse and erratic behavior. When she dies, it doesn’t take long for them to go hunting female students from the local university, abducting and killing them. Several years later, a strong, savvy Black final girl–type named Amanda Taylor puts the pieces together to save her roommate, identifying the perpetrators of the string of murders. Only, this is not the full story. Wright throws in a pretty sharp twist about two-thirds of the way through the novel (and a less successful one at the end), but by that point, having spent so much time in the damaged lives and psyches of Corinthia and Ben has taken a toll. This book is a lot. It’s unflinching, but the violence is graphic and the psychoses incredibly disturbing. The writing is also uneven; there are almost comedic moments—“Ben saw red—and not just blood, either”—that clash with unwieldy sentences like this: “Equal parts sweet and short-tempered, Amanda was a walking paradox who always smiled before narrowing her dark brown eyes when she was angry.” There’s nothing wrong with variety, but this speaks to a larger unevenness in the novel’s style. It’s hard to tell, in the end, whether we are being asked to sympathize with the twins—and if we can, what does that expose about us?
An extremely dark exploration of serial killing. Even an admirable final girl can’t balance the ick.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781636281568
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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