A twisted thriller that explores despair and loneliness with cinematic flair.
Three people search for connection but find themselves drawn into something far darker.
Ever since her husband of almost 50 years died in an accident, Skyla Hull has lived alone in one of two cottages on their property, right beside the decrepit drive-in theater they used to run. But now that her vision has deteriorated, she needs another set of eyes, so she rents out the other cottage to a British man named Teddy Cornwell. Meanwhile, Teddy has been reconnecting with his first love, Linelle Dufort, who’s dissatisfied with her marriage and looking for companionship. Jeremy, a character who's seemingly unconnected to the others other than a brief mention from Teddy, is an unhappy writer who detests his physical appearance. When he gets a writing assignment that will take him back to the city where his first love still lives, he thinks that maybe there’s still hope for them. As Skyla gets to know Teddy, it seems that he might be hiding something—and Skyla herself isn’t exactly forthcoming about what happened to her husband, who she’d discovered was cheating on her. When Linelle decides to turn her online flirtation with Teddy into something real and pays him an unannounced visit, all the characters' lives crash together. The three points of view are initially quite disconnected, and it can be difficult to keep track of the disparate stories at first. But when they finally do converge, the result is satisfying, with a twist that’s hard to see coming. Searles creates convincingly desperate, isolated people who would do anything to feel loved.
A twisted thriller that explores despair and loneliness with cinematic flair.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-077965-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
PROFILES
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
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.
A philosophical discourse inside an addiction narrative, all wrapped up in a quest novel.
Poet Akbar's debut in fiction features Cyrus Shams, a child of the Midwest and of the Middle East. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother, Roya, a passenger on a domestic flight in Iran, was killed by a mistakenly fired U.S. missile. His father, Ali, who after Roya died moved with Cyrus to small-town Indiana and worked at a poultry factory farm, has also died. Cyrus disappeared for a time into alcoholism and drugs. Now on the cusp of 30, newly sober but still feeling stuck in his college town, Cyrus becomes obsessed with making his life matter, and he conceives of a grand poetic project, The Book of Martyrs (at the completion of which, it seems, he may commit suicide). By chance, he discovers online a terminally ill Iranian American artist, Orkideh, who has decided to live out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, having candid tête-à-têtes with the visitors who line up to see her, and Cyrus—accompanied by Zee, his friend and lover, who's understandably a bit alarmed by all this—embarks on a quest to visit and consult with and learn from her. The novel is talky, ambitious, allusive, deeply meditative, and especially good in its exploration of Cyrus as not being between ethnic or national identities but inescapably, radically both Persian and American. It succeeds so well on its own terms that the novel's occasional flaws—big coincidences, forays into other narrators that sometimes fall flat, dream-narratives, occasional small grandiosities—don't mar the experience in any significant way.
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593537619
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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