An irresistible, high-stakes, cross-country adventure about a man with amazing gifts.
Seaborne’s thriller features the return of superpowered action hero Will Stewart.
In this 10th installment in his contemporary adventure series, the author continues the exploits of Will Stewart, an air charter pilot, and his wife, Andy, a detective in Wisconsin’s Essex County Police Department (characterized by her husband as “an equal opportunity juggernaut of justice”). Will and Andy are briefed by FBI Special Agent Leslie Carson-Pelham and her colleagues on the inner workings of a paramilitary insurgency group known as Company W (“The W stands for White and the military grade high-capacity semiautomatic rifles they carry promise supremacy of arms, if not intellect”). Will and Andy have had near-fatal encounters with Company W before and have always been stymied by the compartmentalized nature of the group. “It’s not an organization with a headquarters,” they’re told by Carson-Pelham. “It’s like a cloud or a fog moving across the landscape. Arch conservativism. Racism. White supremacy. Grievance. Fascism by a dozen different names.” The couple are swept up in a complex plot involving the desperate plight of children in a hospice program, with tendrils of corruption and evil extending from Galveston to the Florida Keys. The narrative includes a number of suspicious figures, some of them connected to an evil pharmaceutical company that will arouse readers’ suspicions right from the start. Though the narrative gives a generous amount of the spotlight to Andy, Will is a natural scene-stealer by virtue of his actual superpowers: He can both fly and vanish from sight.
Considering the outsized, comic-book premise, it continues to be downright amazing how grounded Seaborne’s world consistently feels. Yes, Will Stewart has some Marvel-style paranormal gifts, but both his abilities and personality are so thoroughly fleshed out and believable that, in no time at all, the reader matter-of-factly integrates these fantastical elements into the standard heroics-and-gunfire action without a second thought. “This isn’t one of your silly action movies where all the clues line up in the third reel,” Andy deadpans. “It’s hundreds of hours of boring investigative work, connecting dots, scouring phone records, scraping through emails and texts, building cases.” This latest entry in the series maintains the same grounded, workaday feeling, but both Will and Andy consistently strain against it—they’re full-fledged action heroes, always ready to respond with Hollywood-style quips and larger-than-life violence. The author effectively fleshes out even minor walk-on characters, and his portrayal of the loving relationship between his two heroes continues to be the most satisfying aspect of the series, the kind of three-dimensional adult relationship remarkably rare in thrillers like this one. The author’s skill at pacing is razor-sharp—the book is a compulsive page-turner right up until the obligatory exposition dump near the end. The descriptions of the actual workings of Will’s powers are uniformly gripping; it makes the book feel like the best possible combination of the Odd Thomas novels of Dean Koontz and the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child.
An irresistible, high-stakes, cross-country adventure about a man with amazing gifts.Pub Date: May 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781958005781
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Trans World Data
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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