A sometimes-slow thriller best suited for fans already familiar with the series.
A mysterious murder serves as the backdrop for Cover’s third installment in The Sessions University thriller series.
Following the events of the previous series installments, Thomas Simpson, who two years ago was “a nobody associate professor of communications at Sessions, dealing only with [his] courses to ever more ill-prepared and clueless undergraduates” is now the executive director of the philanthropic Mark Berger Foundation. With him is his best friend Zoltan Vastag, a Hungarian who is also a leading cancer researcher at the medical center, and Mark Berger, an alumnus billionaire with an amusing Boston accent (“I like that idea. Might even be a nice naming opportunity in honah of my parents”) who is now chair of the board of trustees at Sessions. After a dangerous few years involving covered-up murders, international espionage, and being under the terrifying watch of U.S. Special Operations, the three men are ready for their lives to return to normal. But just as things seem to be settling down, the acting president of the university is murdered while making his way home on campus. The mysterious killer? An untraceable drone with an equally untraceable 3D-printed gun. Now it’s up to Thomas, Zoltan, and Mark to figure out who’s behind the murder, all while trying to keep themselves safe in the process. Though marketed as a standalone novel, new readers might be confused by the expansive backstory needed to clarify the plot. In the same vein, a big cast of side characters can be hard to keep track of for those unfamiliar with the series. While Cover’s use of a killer drone as a looming terror over the campus is fun and unique, the more thrilling aspects of the novel are overshadowed by an excess of dialogue-heavy scenes that occasionally make the pacing feel sluggish.
A sometimes-slow thriller best suited for fans already familiar with the series.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Epigraph Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 23, 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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