A legal yarn with an ungainly structure that’s rescued by punchy prose.
Three attorneys get involved in a dangerous plot involving sex work in this series mystery.
Impellizzeri’s tale centers on Tricia Connors, a starry-eyed young associate at the Manhattan firm of Barr Knoll, run by its charismatic, egotistical founder of the same name. Instead of the great opportunities Barr promised, she finds herself relegated to menial tasks along with her roommates, Cassandra and Ruth. Tricia is taken in hand and given a style makeover by a woman known only as the Times Square Madam, who inhabits the firm’s top-floor office. She has Tricia rope Cassandra and Ruth into an immigration scam in which the trio pretend to be engaged to three of the firm’s foreign clients to help them score visas. Subsequent assignments involve explicitly sexual “client development” tasks; Cassandra and Ruth resist, but Tricia goes along while angling to become the new madam. In a plotline set in a post-Covid present, Barr Knoll associate Carly Jenner stumbles across files pertaining to deaths in a suspicious car crash 10 years earlier. Carly’s colleague Rain Street believes the victims were murdered and prods Carly to investigate; meanwhile, Carly is fighting on behalf of a group of women in a workplace sex-discrimination lawsuit. This second installment of Impellizzeri’s Riversedge Law Club series paints a mordant picture of low-level lawyering with a feminist edge. Her characters are overworked, underpaid, and perpetually exploited and demeaned by creepy patriarchs. The braided subplots feel unfocused and overcomplicated at times, and the story sometimes spins its wheels as Tricia and Carly ruminate on their unhappy lives. Fortunately, Impellizzeri’s prose is shrewd and evocative (“Rain has a way of drawing people out. Like she already knows your secrets. Like you’re just confirming and not confessing”), and the courtroom jousting is lively and well paced: “Barr, you haven’t changed a bit from the days I was working for you and watching you pimp out women as whores to international real estate tycoons,” testifies one implacable witness on the stand.
A legal yarn with an ungainly structure that’s rescued by punchy prose.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781954332485
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
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