A rousing, topical thriller that keeps an ongoing saga moving at a brisk pace.
In this third installment of Myers’ Black Camelot series, white supremacist organizations seeking murderous revenge incite a race war.
A trio of successful, affluent businesspeople make up a group known as Black Camelot in New York City. Their mere existence makes them targets for hate groups, with the powerful Before Emancipation organization going to great lengths to kill them. Luckily, the Society of Protectors, a private army, so efficiently safeguards Black Camelot that the members don’t even realize they’re in danger. But lately, things have changed; BE’s fury over many of its men falling to the Protectors leads the organization to go after Black Camelot and their allies with a vengeance. And this time, BE’s skilled assassins manage to kill more than one of their targets. Now, it seems, any friends of Black Camelot, or anyone who’s ever helped them, are at grave risk. With help from the nefarious secret society Pre-1860, BE funds a race war, one that the Protectors must put a stop to before more lives are lost. The author brings back many characters from preceding installments, including widow Dawn Davis Stuart and her beloved father-in-law, Yancey Stuart, both of whom are in the assassins’ sights. The bulk of the text is a string of phone calls in which people update others on deaths or murder attempts, an approach that works best for the Protectors’ enigmatic leader, “the Voice” (“We have come up with a name for this entire offensive; we call it Project Maim”). The very size of the cast generates suspense, since the killers could go gunning for any number of people. As in the previous entry, series regulars Donald Alexander, Kwame Mills, and Samantha Rivers (who are Black Camelot) make relatively few appearances, but further planned sequels should give these three ample opportunities to retake the narrative reins.
A rousing, topical thriller that keeps an ongoing saga moving at a brisk pace.Pub Date: July 8, 2021
ISBN: 9798534010404
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Fero Scitus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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.
