An entertaining shoot’em-up whose heroes have to think as carefully as they aim.
Texas ranchers set out to find a couple of murderous bushwhackers in this knotty Western adventure.
The final installment of Morris’ trilogy opens in 1885 with the 50-something ex–Texas Ranger Raifford MacReynolds and his stepson, Tom McKlarren, as comfortable, married ranch proprietors with past conflicts with Native Americans and cattle rustlers long behind them. However, Raifford’s past resurfaces when a couple of his cowhands are killed by prison escapees Bob Boudroux and Slade Pierce, who have old grudges against him. He and Tom saddle up once more for an epic trek to bring the perps to rough justice, equipped with a state-of-the-art arsenal that includes a Sharps Creedmoor rifle, Winchester ’76 Centennial repeaters, Greener 10-gauge shotguns, and miscellaneous revolvers. In previous outings (2010’s The Edge of Forever and 2017’s Reflections in a Distant Mirror), Raifford and Tom confronted the anarchic violence of the open frontier, but 19 years later, they traverse a tamer landscape where the range is fenced in and lawmen insist that criminals be tried. The pair pursue the escaped prisoners in saloons and brothels in towns ruled by corrupt officials; the villains leave a trail of hoofprints and dead bodies that leads into Comanche territory. There, the story gravitates to previous installments’ core elements: Comanche warriors, who now warily coexist with the main characters; long-range marksmanship; and nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse strategies. Morris offers his usual meticulously rendered action—“[Raifford] reached down and jerked his Winchester out of my hands, worked the lever, turned toward the rear, took aim, and fired three times in rapid succession at the trio behind us, who had already broken like a covey of quail”—and energetic prose that features sharply etched characters and punchy dialogue, as when Raifford notes, “The buffalo are gone; you can’t ride ten miles anymore without running into this godforsaken barbed wire.” The result is an acerbic elegy for the Old West with a larger-than-life protagonist.
An entertaining shoot’em-up whose heroes have to think as carefully as they aim.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73633-642-7
Page Count: 437
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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