A thoughtfully written, suspenseful story of intertwined lives that draws the reader quickly along to an unexpected ending.
An Instagram influencer living in Atlanta finds herself at the center of a revenge plot—but is it aimed at her or her husband?
@UnapologeticallyAlex is many things: She's Alex Hutchinson, 39; mother of twin 12-year-olds Penelope and Gigi; a cheerful, supportive Instagram influencer who's proud of herself, pregnancy stretch marks and all; and wife to Patrick, 46, a “self-made moneyman” and nightly news personality. She is also very, very fake, from her perfect photos to her bleached teeth, false eyelashes, and plastic surgery. The night she hits a million followers on Instagram, she gets extremely drunk with AC, her personal assistant, and her husband has to put AC into an Uber and pour Alex into bed. When she wakes up the next morning, she’s unexpectedly gone viral with a post she made while plastered. @UnapologeticallyAlex has done the opposite of what her fans have come to expect: She’s called out a 16-year-old celebrity for being a “two-bit whore” with the “brains of a dodo bird.” When she starts thinking about damage control, she realizes that AC is missing. And then her life starts to unravel—the death and rape threats against her and her girls begin and then get worse, she is doxxed, and her husband gets more and more evasive as the police look into him in their efforts to find the missing AC. Alex’s and Patrick’s stories parallel another: Anna Claire is a maid in a divey motel, picked up and delivered to work one day by a rich, sunglasses-clad stranger in a BMW when her car is put out of commission by a flat. He wines and dines her, and she ends up pregnant and laundering money for him—moving enormous amounts of cash through the motel where she works. The stories touch on murder, torture, implied rape, and violent threats without glorifying graphic details.
A thoughtfully written, suspenseful story of intertwined lives that draws the reader quickly along to an unexpected ending.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-778-33325-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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