An incisive, suspenseful series launch with a promising sleuth.
A strange death sets a tourist town on edge in this taut thriller.
A charter captain and his customer discover a body floating near Chatham, Massachusetts. What captures the medical examiner’s attention is the dead woman’s old-fashioned clothing. Thanks to a Boston Globe editor’s affinity for Cape Cod articles, reporter Stacie Davis gets assigned the story. She grudgingly heads to Chatham only to discover that authorities have little new information. So she spends her time writing several features about the Cape. One is about a supposedly haunted lighthouse near where the body was found. Trying to avoid a needy ex-boyfriend and to get another story, Stacie meets with handsome Capt. Carl Lane. The reporter convinces him to take her to the lighthouse at night. After a bizarre evening, the captain goes back to the lighthouse to attempt a phone call and is attacked. In a series of implausible events, he develops amnesia following the attack and can’t back up Stacie’s version of what happened, so the authorities view Stacie as a suspect—an overeager reporter attempting to fabricate an exciting story. She must unearth the connection, if there is one, between the Jane Doe case and the attack on Carl before she gets charged for the attack herself. In his latest thriller, Yocum has created a spirited protagonist for a potential new series. She is too curious for her own good and knows how to manipulate people to get results. Yocum, who himself worked at the Boston Globe, uses that experience to bring the newspaper industry to life for the reader. Yocum is also a Chatham resident and turns that seafaring town into a character as well, with its history and citizens front and center. The novel effectively juggles various perspectives—those of the lead, the locals, and law enforcement—giving the reader different takes on the mystery.
An incisive, suspenseful series launch with a promising sleuth.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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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