A fictional validation of the phrase “more money than brains.”
In Wittenborn’s TV-ready novel, an Adirondack hunting club shelters a cabal of wealthy misogynists.
Growing up in the backwoods of Rangeley, New York, Evie Quimby, has been raised to trap, fish, and hunt—and to be resourceful and wary. Her adoptive parents are known as the town hippies. One night in 2001, when she's 17, Evie narrowly escapes being molested by a group of local slackers when Lulu Mannheim intervenes. Lulu owns Valhalla, a mansion on acres of pristine Sister Lakes property. The two women form an unlikely friendship, and Evie first sees Lulu’s attorney, Win Langley, as an avuncular, mentoring figure. But readers know, from an earlier chapter, that Win is a sociopath—apparently it’s his mother’s fault—who was groomed by Porter Moran, an older Wall Street investment banker who hires only handsome young men without scruples. Moran and Langley have recruited a number of other morally challenged males to join the exclusive Mohawk Club, whose lodge and acreage adjoins Lulu’s property. The group style themselves as the Lost Boys. Lulu’s fiance, Charlie, a Langley protégé, turns up dead, wearing Lulu’s wedding dress. Although she has every reason to suspect Langley in Charlie’s “suicide,” Evie, incredibly, trusts him. That trust is shattered when, under the guise of encouraging her nascent art-restoration career, Langley drugs and rapes her. But Langley, with his sexual proclivities, is an outlier—the Lost Boys’ main mission is financial, though the details of their shenanigans remain frustratingly opaque. Seventeen years later, Evie’s quest to find a bone-marrow donor for her cancer-stricken 14-year-old daughter Chloé precipitates dizzying complications. We’re soon in high-concept thriller territory with only glancing nods to subtext. Evie is a well-rounded, fully motivated character, but Lulu is a stereotypical good rich girl, and the Lost Boys are one-dimensional scoundrels.
A fictional validation of the phrase “more money than brains.”Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00581-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
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