A bracing page-turner with an unconventional hero.
A woman hires a private eye to find her missing brother—who is in trouble with a ruthless Mexican drug cartel leader—in this novel.
Damian Playa, a disillusioned cartel hit man looking to leave the life, has a simple job: Go to a Las Vegas casino, buy $400,000 worth of chips, place a few skimpy bets at a poker table, and cash out. Failure to do so will mean the gang rape and violent deaths of his mother and girlfriend. But after he wins a couple of bets at the roulette table, even that threat isn’t enough to stop Damian from going all in. Inevitably, he loses it all and disappears. His sister, Araceli, hires private investigator Scott Brody to find him. She describes Damian as “a three-time no-talent loser” and tells Brody she does not want the police informed about the situation. “If Damian’s involved in something dirty, like I suspect, I don’t want the cops finding out about it,” she explains. The investigation, inevitably, is not as cut-and-dried as a mere missing person case. It turns out that Don Gaetano’s Cobalt Green Tide cartel is into some deep state doings, and Brody must grapple with an insidious governmental conspiracy and players with hidden agendas. Brody is an epileptic, which is a unique vulnerability that deftly establishes him as a fighter who refuses to quit while allowing Cassiday to indulge in some tony literary allusions. (Brody frequents a website for those who share his disability and uses the name Myshkin from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.) As a scene-setter, Cassiday effectively grabs readers (“Three nuns packing guns under their black habits riding in a silver Range Rover SUV drove up to a small Catholic church” is the gripping book’s opener). The dialogue, though, is a bit hit and miss in this fast-paced tale.
A bracing page-turner with an unconventional hero.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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