A promising but ultimately confounding suspense yarn.
In Welde’s novel, a married couple in witness protection, face danger from the Mafia and from a disturbed former FBI agent.
After schoolteachers Ann and Steve Kent were forced to flee Miami for Los Angeles, the one shining light is the recent adoption of their son, Peter Ford. But drug lord William Vitello, whose brother, Frank, is responsible for the shootings, unearths their location and arranges a hit. Fortunately, the authorities find out in time and move the family to sleepy Cambria, 200 miles north of Los Angeles. Then FBI agent Hank Gifford soon spills their history to their new neighbor, David Boone, a hardboiled retired fed whom Gifford knows. Gifford asks Boone to keep an eye on them, and Boone happily obliges. However, he’s instantly obsessed with Ann, who reminds him of his late wife, Susie—a fellow agent who was killed in the line of duty. He creepily installs a secret camera in the couple’s bedroom without their knowledge. When a suspicious man arrives in town asking about the family, it appears that Vitello’s henchmen are closing in; Boone, meanwhile, is hearing strange voices and becomes fixated on avenging Susie’s death, which may have involved the Vitellos. Welde’s novel has a high-stakes premise and well-executed scenes of violence, and the twisty final chapters will keep readers guessing as they speed toward the conclusion. However, his prose feels unpolished, with stilted dialogue and melodramatic moments; for example, when Ann encounters gnats during a walk, it’s likened to a “biblical pestilence” and “salvos of aggression.” An excessive number of characters and convoluted plot points (including bizarre psychic experiences) make it difficult for readers to know where their sympathies should lie, and the third-person narration confusingly jumps between various players. There are also occasional errors; for example, readers are told that Peter that was adopted at the age of 15, and then at 12.
A promising but ultimately confounding suspense yarn.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 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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