Berg has earned entrance to this genre club—readers will hope for further adventures.
A young Anglo-Iranian grows up fighting for freedom on many fronts while discovering who he really is and what he believes in Berg’s military thriller.
Life in Iran begins idyllically for Ricardo, who joins his mother Samira, American father David, and sister Hannah. Even when the Shah is installed, life is still tolerable. But the Islamic Republic is another matter, bringing religious tyranny and the Iraq/Iran War (Ricardo is dragooned into the army). Long before that, though, David abandons the family, and readers realize that he is not what he had seemed (he will surface again and again). Ricardo, as a teenager, will not accept the repressive regime of the Ayatollahs; he becomes the motorcycle-driving “Shadow Rider,” leading the Revolutionary Guards into blind alleyways where they can be attacked from the rooftops. Ricardo becomes a folk hero of sorts and a scourge of the government. Ricardo learns that he can withstand pain and torture, and when he is sent to the front lines against Iraq, it awakens a martial spirit in him. When he escapes to the United States and joins the Army, he is practically ecstatic (“he had forgotten what it felt like to wake up knowing that the day wasn’t a battle to survive”); surely Sgt. Ricardo Rosen is on his way to many more hair-raising adventures in the future. This is a very impressive debut novel, and Ricardo wears his hero cape stylishly, figuratively speaking; hopefully, it won’t eventually verge into the cartoonish if subsequent stories follow. This line captures his ethos well: “You thought you could drown me in fear, but you only taught me how to breathe underwater.” Berg says that the story is largely autobiographical, and that he himself was Ricardo Rosen. Surely an interview would be fascinating.
Berg has earned entrance to this genre club—readers will hope for further adventures.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798991971409
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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