A gripping tale of suspense that takes fundamentalism to dystopian extremes.
In this speculative-fiction series entry, a megalomaniacal religious leader forms a cult that kidnaps unmarried pregnant women.
Stacey Davenport has been elected to the Kansas state legislature to oppose the ultrareligious Certainty Party, led by Reverend Ezekial. He attempts to pass bizarre laws that severely restrict women’s lives, such as the Make Our Motherhood Strong (MOMS) Act that aims to force unmarried mothers, unmarried pregnant women, and their sisters over the age of 12 to marry men of his congregation. Stacey, who’s unmarried and with child herself, stops its passage, so Ezekial and his motorcycle gang, the Genesis Riders, launch a terror campaign, kidnapping women who have children out of wedlock. One of the abductees, a young woman named Ruth, has been made one of Ezekial’s wives. Stacey’s sister, Amy, and father, Don, help Ruth escape, and she becomes a soldier in the fight to free the women of Kansas—including her own sister, Renee.Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Grant, the father of Stacy’s unborn child, navigates state laws as he starts a new relationship with co-worker Eleni. The “Consent to Sex” form has been signed, and he and Eleni seem well-matched, but he can’t stop thinking about Stacey. Can the pair find each other again? This second installment of Keech’s Red State/Blue State Confessions series is an absorbing read, and it manages to effectively combine social critique with nail-biting suspense. Ruth is a particularly memorable character as a teenager whose militancy was forged in fear and violation, and other figures over the course of the story are similarly dogged and sincere. However, although the narrative delves into the implications of Red State Kansas’ harsh political atmosphere in some detail, its criticisms of Blue State efforts to legislate equality feel more thinly developed.
A gripping tale of suspense that takes fundamentalism to dystopian extremes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Real Nice Books
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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