A genre-defying, spooky, and original take on our country’s deep racial trauma.
A family curse steeped in the trauma of slavery and the Civil War continues to visit carnage on unsuspecting victims into the 21st century.
1865: Five formerly enslaved men and boys run from a Georgia plantation; though the Civil War ended with a Union victory, they know that the South is still a dangerous, potentially fatal place for them, so they travel by night. 2000: A man meets a beautiful woman in a New York City bar. They have sex and, hours later, his body lies broken 18 stories beneath his hotel window. In her nearby apartment, the woman, Sarah Toomey, finds herself confused, with little memory of the day. Meanwhile, former Rikers Island corrections officer Yvonne Howard is now a pastry chef in Greenwich Village. Bitty Willets, “a frequent guest at Rikers,” shows up at her restaurant one night, begging for help in uncovering what happened to her brother, Crawford—who’d recently died by jumping, or falling, out a hotel window. Yvonne can’t get the request out of her head, so she teams up with Kenneth “Kofi” Collins—a writer she meets through a class he’s teaching at the local library—and his nephew, Bean, but she can’t prevent Bitty’s grisly death in a restaurant bathroom. When the friends uncover a haunting (and maybe haunted?) handmade quilt, they begin to wonder if the murders of two members of this family might not be supernatural in origin. As they investigate, the mysterious Sarah, desired by everyone who meets her, floats in and out of the narrative, falling into a passionate affair with a co-worker that loosens all her inhibitions. This may not be a good thing, because Sarah’s psyche—and her body—may not be completely her own. Carter cuts back and forth from the 21st century to the post–Civil War South and also drops in on 1969, 1987, and a few other years, exploring generations of two families who seem to be both targets and perpetrators of horrific violence and murder.
A genre-defying, spooky, and original take on our country’s deep racial trauma.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593467282
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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