Fun—if overly familiar—vampire fiction made palatable by memorable characters.
In Wilson’s supernatural thriller, a young woman discovers she has a rare, supernatural gift after surviving a tragic accident.
All things considered, Sarah Woodward ought not to be alive. When the bus she was on swerved off the road and plunged into Elliott Bay, Sarah was the sole survivor among the 15 victims. Not only did she survive, she had the presence of mind and absence of injury to swim to shore, where she found herself physically (if not emotionally) unscathed. Soon after, though, strange things begin happening to Sarah; she feels, somehow, both alive and dead, as though trapped in a sort of purgatory. Small injuries to her skin heal almost instantaneously, and she keeps having the same dream of a mysterious cave that feels inherently familiar to her but that she cannot place in memory or the real world. While at an art gallery, seeking out some normalcy in the aftermath of these upheavals to her reality, she meets a young-looking man with a keen, almost stalker-like interest in her, and, despite her best instincts, she goes to a second location with him. She discovers, quickly, that this man, Alex Smith, is not young at all; in fact, he’s a vampire, and more than three centuries old. He has been looking for Sarah ever since the bus crash she survived—he witnessed the whole thing, his vampiric senses able to trace her far-off heartbeat as he heard all the others go silent. Around the time she meets Alex, Sarah is also questioned in the bookstore where she works by a mysterious stranger, Lucy Goodspeed, who claims to work for a shadowy organization known as the “Society of Keepers.” Before Sarah has a chance to talk with Lucy, she and Alex discover something troubling: Sarah’s blood has the capacity to make Alex “alive” again, at least somewhat—after tasting a mere dribble, he’s breathing again, temporarily, for the first time in centuries. When this experiment nearly kills him, Sarah decides it’s time to talk to the Society of Keepers, hoping to get some answers—but the mystery only deepens when, unprompted, Lucy shows Sarah a photograph of that very cave she’s been dreaming of for weeks…
In her first novel, Wilson has managed to find an interesting wrinkle in the classic vampire narrative in the character of Sarah, a sort of supernatural foil who is not the typical werewolf or vaguely Christian ideological crusader, which helps to make this vampire yarn feel at least a bit fresh. That being said, readers’ appetites for sentences like “I can’t tell her I’ve started falling insanely too fast for someone who happens to be a vampire” have been eroded by decades of teen-lit plumbing the exact same dynamics. The plotting sometimes feels too convenient—one wonders about that chance meeting at the art museum—but there is real pathos to Sarah’s character, who feels like a friend from college you’ve mostly forgotten about but who now finds herself in extraordinary circumstances. Fans of vampire fiction won’t find much new here, but those open to an undead thread running through an engaging narrator’s strange experience will enjoy the ride.
Fun—if overly familiar—vampire fiction made palatable by memorable characters.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9798989867516
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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