The Women by Kristin Hannah

 Reviewing The Women by Kristin Hannah is proving to be a hard task to serve this epic tale being published in February the justice it deserves. In Part 1, Frankie McGrath decides to join the Army Nurse Corps to go to Vietnam, inspired by the enlistment of her brother into the Navy as well as the importance her father places on being a hero. The narrative follows Frankie throughout her service with the Army Nurse Corps, with Part 2 dealing with her struggle to rejoin the world she left behind for Vietnam.

Frankie, who was raised on a walled and gated estate on Coronado Island in California, is unprepared for just how primitive all the facilities are when she arrives at her post in the Thirty-Sixth Evac Mobile Hospital in Vietnam in 1967. She is soon overwhelmed by the absolute horror in the aftermath of the wounded arriving in a background of screaming injured, shouting of orders by the nurses and doctors, and the smoke, all the smoke. Two nurses, Ethel Flint and Barb Johnson, school Frankie in combat nursing, and the three build a friendship that will take them into life after the war where people keep telling them, there were no women serving in Vietnam.

The war is raging during Frankie’s first tour of duty. Often the only thing she can do for injured soldiers is to hold their hands until they die. The damage inflicted by mortar and bullets is at first overwhelming, but Frankie, like all the other military nurses, is forced to step up and do things she was never trained for like removing a spleen and closing the operation. With only three doctors assigned to her location, she learns more and more under their direction. After her time is served, she extends her tour because she realizes with the shortage of medical personnel, she is sorely needed.

Romance enters the picture when Frankie is pursued by Dr. Jamie Callahan, one of the doctors she works with. When she learns that he is one of those “war bachelors” her father had warned her about, she shuts down the relationship before it blooms. The last time she sees Jamie, his helicopter starting his pathway home has been shot down, and he becomes just another soldier with devastating injuries that will most likely claim his life.

Soon after, Frankie is assigned to the Seventy-First Evac near Pleiku, nicknamed “Rocket City,” where the fighting is even heavier than her first posting. There, Frankie reunites with one of her brother’s Navy buddies, pilot Joseph Ryerson Walsh. After Rye swears he is no longer engaged to a woman in the States, Frankie allows herself to enter into a relationship with him, spending R&R together in Hawaii.

As if life in Vietnam is not hard enough, the women start hearing about how the homeland they left behind becomes divided by war and politics, how Vietnam heroes are not given the welcome back that they deserve. Barb becomes extremely active in protesting the war once she becomes a civilian again, and as often as she can, she includes Ethel and Frankie in the activities of the group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

While waiting for Rye to return to America, Frankie learns his helicopter was shot down, and there are no remains. Between the devastation to men’s bodies, the change of the Americans’ hearts about the war, and her own heart broken not once but twice, Frankie spirals down, becoming dependent on the pills, booze, and cigarettes she was introduced to in Vietnam. When she seeks help from the Veterans Administration, she is turned down once and then twice as only the men who fought in the war were recognized as veterans.

There is so much to unpack in this historical fiction that pays tribute to those women who served and sacrificed only to be overlooked by others except for those they nurtured and those with whom they served. One day, Frankie will visit The Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., which includes the names of eight women, all of them nurses.

Kristin Hannah started her writing career solidly in women’s fiction with books like Firefly Lane but she moved to combining her women’s stories with  historical fiction, giving readers works about World War II in The Nightingale (2015) and Winter Garden (2010), and the Great Depression in The Four Winds (2018).

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting December 9, 2023.

I would like to thank St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 

Northwoods by Amy Pease

 Northwoods, releasing January 9, is a debut novel by Amy Pease. Northwoods of Wisconsin is a vacation area near the small town of Shaky Lake with its sheriff’s department working within a too small budget. When a teenage boy is found dead in a boat, Eli North begins the investigation as he is a deputy there working under the supervision of his mother the sheriff.

Eli was once a strong, thriving young man with a job he loved and a wife and son. After deployment to Afghanistan, his powers of investigation are still sharp but his emotional wounds run deep and cloud his judgment. He copes by drinking, which is to say he is not coping well.

When it is determined the deceased was injected with opioids and suffered two head injuries, the entire sheriff’s department—all three deputies and the sheriff herself—has its hands full. Worse, during the investigation, they find that a teenage girl is missing.

Before the cases are solved, a pharmaceutical company trying to push its new drug that promises to save opioid addicts becomes entangled in the case. Eli determines that there is more going on than a dead boy and a missing girl. This case is his chance to redeem himself as the man he once was, but if he fails, he could lose everything.

Amy Pease, a nurse practitioner, is a nationally recognized HIV specialist. She lives in Wisconsin with her family. 

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting November 21, 2023.

I would like to thank Atria Books/Emily Bestler Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 

The Heiress by Rachel Hawkins

 The Heiress is none other than Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore, the much married, richest woman in North Carolina in this novel coming out January 9. She was kidnapped as a child but was later found to have been taken by a worker on her family’s estate, Ashby House of Tavistock in the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

None of the marriages last for long—husbands’ death all under suspicious circumstances--but she did adopt an orphan named Camden who is in position to inherit everything after her death, including the estate and a 9-digit fortune with nothing going to Ruby’s younger sister who has always lived on the estate with her family.

Surprise, surprise, Cam does not want the house, the money, or the family. He just wants to teach English in Colorado where he had settled with his wife Jules. After 10 years away, he reluctantly returns to North Carolina to address things that need to be taken care of within the estate.

His calculating aunt and his cousins are as unpleasant as ever as they seek a way out of Cam’s inheritance to their benefit, raising questions about whether or not the Ruby who died was really the Ruby who was kidnapped nearly 7 decades ago. A rousing conclusion will settle the estate in a way that could have never been predicted. 

The Heiress is Rachel Hawkins fourth novel for adults. An Alabama author, she also writes under the pseudonym Erin Sterling. She wrote her first novel while teaching high school English. 

The Coworker by Freida McFadden

 (Did not send this out to the Scout as it came out in August. I am also concerned about some allegations that the author generously takes plot from other writers.)

The Coworker in Freida McFadden’s latest psychological thriller is Dawn Schiff, who appears to be on the autism spectrum, yet her co-workers do not seem to pick up on that, and instead they are not very nice to her. However, is this all an act on her part? 

Her arch nemesis seems to be Natalie, the top salesperson of a nutritional supplement company called Vixed, who works in the cubicle next to Dawn. Both women are driven by secrets in their lives.

Seemingly Dawn, who works at Vixed as an accountant,  lacks empathy, rarely says the right thing because she cannot judge those around her, and ultimately has no friends. Or does she?

Dawn is an early-to-the office type, maintains a strict schedule of bathroom breaks and lunch breaks. People could set a clock by her. She’s never late, and yet one day she does not show up to work at all. Natalie, who has given Dawn a ride home in the past, becomes worried because no one has heard from Dawn, and when Natalie picked up a call in Dawn’s cubicle, she hears who she thinks is Dawn say, “Help me!” 

After work, Natalie goes to Dawn’s place, where she finds a lot of blood on the floor. Natalie calls the police, but in a twist, she becomes the prime suspect. What next happens is well-planned and played out by a Dawn who has been working toward this certain moment for years. 

Freida McFadden, a brain injury trained physician, has stated that one of her favorite books is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn because of the incredible twist in that story. She writes psychological thrillers and medical humor novels.  She self-published her first book on Amazon in 2013.  McFadden is best known for her book The Housemaid. She lives with her family and black cat in a centuries-old three-story home overlooking an ocean.

The Locked Door by Freida McFadden

 Did not send this out to the Scout as it came out in October, republished in paperback form. I am also concerned about some allegations that the author generously takes plot from other writers. Google it.

Nora Davis is a surgeon who is keeping a terrible secret about her father in The Locked Door by Freida McFadden. Having changed her name to dodge any link to her father, Nora is on the verge of being outed as a copycat is out there while her father remains in prison for the rest of his life.

Trouble starts when two of her patients become victims of the copycat killer, bringing the police to her office. Nora has always kept a low profile, living a solitary life with little variance. She gets reacquainted with a boyfriend from college and engages in a game of push-me, pull-me with him as she is so damaged from what happened in her childhood.

Nora constantly reassures herself she is not like her father as she works hard in the operating room  to save lives rather than to take lives. When she basically forces a vehicle into a crash, she begins to question herself. Could she be a killer like her father? She’s a surgeon saving lives! Does the apple fall not far from the tree? No, it does not, but there is the expected twist that comes with the psychological thrillers that McFadden writes.

Freida McFadden, a brain injury trained physician, writes psychological thrillers and medical humor novels.  She self-published her first book on Amazon in 2013. A New York native, she has stated in interviews that all the protagonists in her books are based on her. When McFadden was a kid, she read The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin and Judy Blume books. She is most known for her book The Housemaid. McFadden lives with her family and black cat in a centuries-old three-story home overlooking an ocean.

The Madstone by Elizabeth Crook

The Madstone by Elizabeth Crook, coming out November 7, brings back Benjamin Shreve, the narrator of Crook’s 2018 title, The Which Way Tree. This time, he is writing a book-length letter to Small Tot, a 4-year-old boy, to be read when Tot reaches 19, the age Benjamin is when he puts this story down on paper in November of 1868.

In this work of historical fiction, Benjamin, a carpenter by trade in Comfort, Texas, encounters a pregnant woman named Nell Banes and her son Henry, called Tot, when a  stagecoach stops in his town. The pair are running away from Texas to avoid revenge-seeking outlaws who are hot on their trail. Benjamin selflessly does everything he can to help Nell and Tot, at the same time, falling in love with them both.

Turns out Nell reported to the Freedmen’s Bureau the whereabouts of the gang of the Swamp Fox of the Sulfur, a group that has been harassing and committing acts of violence toward black people. Now she and Tot are on the run toward Indianola to board a ship to New Orleans to live with a cousin.

The route to safety is wrought with obstacles including Tot being bitten by a rabid coyote who he thought was a dog. It is said the madstone, a special medicinal substance that when soaked in milk will cure rabies, so Benjamin must head out to the nearest towns to try to find one. This hitch in the plans brings the outlaws that much closer and the escape that much out of reach.

Elizabeth Crook is an American novelist who specializes in historical fiction, in particular the Western. She has  written seven novels, including The Night Journal, which received The Spur Award from Western Writers of America. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.

 Mickey Haller is known for taking and winning nearly impossible cases, and this she said/he’s dead case that has Lucinda Sanz locked up now for five years is no exception. Even better, Haller’s half-brother Harry Bosch is working as an investigator for him, looking for possible cases of innocence similar to The Innocence Project in this 7^th book in the Lincoln Lawyer series, Resurrection Walk, due out November 7.

The book starts with such a walk, which is when the shackles come off and the last metal door standing between the prisoner and freedom opens like “the gates of heaven.” Haller has been able to get a ruling of “actual innocence” in court for a young man who was 14 years into a life sentence.

When Haller’s mail blows up with other inmates seeking to prove their own innocence, he has Bosch work through the letters, evaluating each one as possible wrong convictions. Bosch has narrowed it down to two, and after a little investigation in which things just don’t add up, he suggests Haller make a jailhouse call on Lucinda, who has maintained her innocence all along in the five years she’s been locked up.

However, some people do not want the case reopened. Lucinda’s ex-husband was a deputy sheriff, and his colleagues say that justice was done in arresting Lucinda for his death. Lucinda’s first lawyer does not want to be accused of poor representation. Turns out Lucinda was cornered by her lawyer into pleading nolo, or no contest, to manslaughter instead of pleading guilty or not guilty because if her case went to trial, she faced life in prison.

As Bosch digs into the case and Haller starts to plot his defense for Lucinda, they find a number of problems with the so-called evidence and see a resurrection for their client if they can disprove the gun residue test and investigate the trajectory of the bullets that killed Deputy Sanz.

After Michael Connelly spent three years covering crime in Los Angeles, he started writing crime fiction. Fifteen books into his career, he came up with a new character The Lincoln Lawyer in 2005 in a book with the same name. The book was adapted as a 2011 film of the same name, starring Matthew McConaughey, and is currently a Netflix series in its second season.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting October 6, 2023.

I would like to thank the Hatchette Book Group, Little, Brown and Company, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.