A competent though clunky thriller and family drama.
When a disgraced NYPD detective returns reluctantly to her small-town Ohio home, bringing her young daughter with her, she is drawn not only into a possible murder mystery, but also into the long-buried secrets of her own family and of the town’s leading citizens.
Nobody knows why Leigh O’Donnell pulled her gun on a fellow NYPD officer during a chase, least of all Leigh herself. In those three minutes, she admits, “I had blown up my life.” Now suspended from duty and alienated from her husband—who is also her commanding officer—she retreats to Copper Falls, Ohio, where her brother, a cop, invites her to join the local force. There, she begins to investigate what looks like a triple suicide, but it’s one that eerily echoes a similar event decades earlier. The recent victims, all 25-year-old White men, were “cleaned in preparation for slaughter. Ritualized.” And all three had recently visited an elderly local woman who has mysterious knowledge of ancient shrines hidden in the Copper Falls caves. The ensuing drama unfolds at a brisk pace with just enough suspense to keep the reader jogging along. Tension flags, however, when yet another plot twist materializes—could those maple syrup operations be meth labs? Is that really a twin sister? Is the sacred cave a crime scene?—and when the protagonist’s perpetual agonizing—should she stay or go back? Does she still love her husband?—becomes more irritating than engaging. The rural landscape is, however, powerfully evoked. “By now, it was almost ten in the morning,” Leigh notes of one outing. “We were driving away from the center of town, toward a blanket of rust red and hunter green and lots of nothing.”
A competent though clunky thriller and family drama.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-54021-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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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