This engaging, layered work proves to be both a love story and a cautionary tale.
An idealistic teacher gets sucked into an unfamiliar world of war profiteering in this bracing thriller.
Life changes for Roger Williams, a math teacher, when he meets and falls in love with Jill, an attractive woman who’s probably out of his league. They marry despite knowing little about each other. All Roger knows about Jill’s job is that she works for the shadowy Army contractor Grayrock. When Jill disappears, Roger suspects that she may have run off with her co-worker Lyle White. At the urging of friendly restaurateur Omar, Roger travels to Afghanistan looking for his wife. Once there, he eventually learns from Lyle that Jill is probably dead back in the States. He also discovers that he’s unknowingly part of a scheme to launder aid money stolen by Jill and Lyle. As Roger struggles to extricate himself from the con, he also tries to protect Sophie Martens, a Belgian aid worker. Had the money not been stolen, it was earmarked for Sophie’s group, which trains female teachers in Afghanistan. Despite being out of their depth, Roger and Sophie attempt to right a raft of wrongs in a country at war. In this battle between those trying to help (aid workers) and those trying to profit (exploitive contractors), author Keech, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Iran, makes no bones about which side he supports. Lyle is outright venal, with Jill only slightly more likable. Keech portrays Roger and Sophie as forces of good—moral but naïve—and their journey toward finding each other amid danger is memorable. However, the true scene-stealer here is the country of Afghanistan, brought to life in this well-researched volume (“Crawling through the traffic, they saw the turquoise blue dome of the mosque and its twin minarets against the mountains in the distance”). The chaos of war catalyzes key developments in the plot, and Afghanistan’s citizenry plays a strong supporting role.
This engaging, layered work proves to be both a love story and a cautionary tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8985667004
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
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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