A highly palatable fusion of medical thriller and daytime drama.
Sowyak’s third medical thriller to feature Maggie Blanchard chronicles the Charlotte nurse’s attempts to balance her job at a busy hospital and her marriage to a billionaire.
Nurse Maggie Blanchard has her life turned upside down when her husband Kerrington—“a billionaire twenty times over [who] carried a powerful reputation on Wall Street”—inexplicably contracts a deadly virus. As the highly infectious disease (which is described as “a virus so potent it could easily and quickly wipe out a country—even the world”) eats away at Kerrington’s body, Maggie, with the help of close friend and fellow nurse Benny Maxwell, desperately tries to link her husband’s sickness to a top-secret subterranean biohazardous lab secreted away on her mansion’s sprawling estate. Complicating matters is their friend Dr. Sunday Richardson and her potentially career-ending problems associated with a gravely ill patient (who happens to be a well-known malpractice lawyer) and his manipulative wife who, prior to his hospitalization, found out about his infidelity with a beautiful ER doctor. While the high-intensity hospital setting and numerous medically-driven storylines (like that of a young Jehovah’s Witness who receives a blood transfusion that jeopardizes his eternal life) are compelling, the fuel that powers this narrative engine is the intriguing ensemble cast of characters, who display engaging depth and dynamism. Maggie and Kerrington’s respective arcs—and their surprisingly affecting love story—are obviously the primary foci, but Benny’s romantic entanglement with his daughter’s new au pair, Sunday’s impending divorce from her emotionally detached husband (“Unemotional and cold. I felt like I was meeting with my banker to discuss interest rates”), and Kerrington’s actress sister and her struggles with her alcoholic spouse are just a few of the entertaining secondary narrative threads that will keep readers turning pages.
A highly palatable fusion of medical thriller and daytime drama.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798988599838
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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