Evanovich fans may enjoy, but devotees of harder-edged thrillers will be disappointed.
Janet Evanovich meets Thomas Harris in Gagnon’s uneven fifth thriller.
Street-smart Amber Jamison is mortified when she finds herself “bound up like a sushi roll” in a van, potentially the next victim of a serial killer terrorizing Johnson City, Tennessee. Before the Pokémon-obsessed psycho can finish her off, she's rescued by a ski mask–wearing woman armed with a cattle prod who disappears before Amber can learn why this mysterious stranger is hunting serial murderers. Escaping the Pikachu Killer is just the start of our protagonist's misadventures. After an FBI agent calls to set up an interview, Amber, fearful that law enforcement may have uncovered her grifter past, flees her carefully built life as a college student and heads to Las Vegas, where she settles in at the seedy Getaway Motel. Her reprieve, though, is brief; Grace, Amber’s ski mask–wearing savior, arrives on her doorstep, warning that the killer she’s pursuing is stalking Amber, and is later attacked. Amber must rely on her best grifter skills and the support of noir-loving motel manager Dot, romantic interest and sex worker with a heart of gold Marcella, and the injured Grace to catch a monster. Mixing snarky humor that often falls flat and increasingly far-fetched situations with gruesome serial killings makes for a queasy read. Also suffering from queasiness is a lead character who constantly vomits to reveal her emotional turmoil, whether from fear, panic attack, drugs and booze, or revealing her innermost secrets. That’s just lazy writing. The switch from Amber’s sarcastic first-person narration to the solemn third person to reveal the serial killer’s backstory feels clunky and manipulative. Underneath this mess lie the bones of a good thriller about resourceful, empowered women who team up to fight back.
Evanovich fans may enjoy, but devotees of harder-edged thrillers will be disappointed.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780593540749
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.
A woman fears she made a fatal mistake by taking in a blood-soaked tween during a storm.
High winds and torrential rain are forecast for “The Middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire,” making Casey question the structural integrity of her ramshackle rental cabin. Still, she’s loath to seek shelter with her lecherous landlord or her paternalistic neighbor, so instead she just crosses her fingers, gathers some candles, and hopes for the best. Casey is cooking dinner when she notices a light in her shed. She grabs her gun and investigates, only to find a rail-thin girl hiding in the corner under a blanket. She’s clutching a knife with “Eleanor” written on the handle in black marker, and though her clothes are bloody, she appears uninjured. The weather is rapidly worsening, so before she can second-guess herself, former Boston-area teacher Casey invites the girl—whom she judges to be 12 or 13—inside to eat and get warm. A wary but starving Eleanor accepts in exchange for Casey promising not to call the police—a deal Casey comes to regret after the phones go down, the power goes out, and her hostile, sullen guest drops something that’s a big surprise. Meanwhile, in interspersed chapters labeled “Before,” middle-schooler Ella befriends fellow outcast Anton, who helps her endure life in Medford, Massachusetts, with her abusive, neglectful hoarder of a mother. As per her usual, McFadden lulls readers using a seemingly straightforward thriller setup before launching headlong into a series of progressively seismic (and increasingly bonkers) plot twists. The visceral first-person, present-tense narrative alternates perspectives, fostering tension and immediacy while establishing character and engendering empathy. Ella and Anton’s relationship particularly shines, its heartrending authenticity counterbalancing some of the story’s soapier turns.
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781464260919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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