A gripping and thoughtful psychological tale.
A thriller focuses on a family’s struggle to survive when a small town’s technology abruptly stops working.
At first it seems as if it’s just one car not starting. But soon, all the phones, electricity, radios, and internet suffer a power failure in the town of Harpursville, New York. The residents wonder if the outage has also affected the entire country—or even the whole world. Their theories range from sunspots and electromagnetic pulses to terrorist attacks (“To hear some tell it, the Russians, Chinese, or ISIS would be rolling in to enslave the good people of the US of A any minute”). Kevin Barton thinks the situation is likely temporary, while his wife, Monica, worries about their dwindling food supply. Her fear gnaws at her day and night. Monica becomes concerned about the family’s safety and survival, especially with her daughter’s beautiful best friend, Dina McCray, getting stranded at the Bartons’ house, eating their food, and taking up space. An attempt to walk Dina home goes awry, leaving Kevin feeling humiliated and making the girl’s stay permanent. As time passes and chaos starts to spread, one man steps up to coordinate the town’s response, his organizational approach deemed visionary by many, including Kevin. Then a request is made that tears Monica and Kevin apart, the former growing increasingly paranoid and the latter preparing to do everything he can to save his family. O’Handley’s novel is a tense literary thriller that skillfully examines the line between survival and decency, fear and safety, power and impotence. Kevin is an average man who must deal with a growing feeling of powerlessness throughout the story, while Monica takes the lead early on regarding the family’s safety. Their different psychological reactions to the events taking place send them in opposite directions while the townspeople’s restlessness mushrooms around them, adding further pressure on the family. It’s in the microcosm of the Bartons’ house that the insidious drama of the unknown versus the known plays out and is brilliantly developed until the fitting conclusion.
A gripping and thoughtful psychological tale.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Breaking Night Press
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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