Cold Cold Heart

November 17, 2014
Dana Nolan, the heroine of this chilling psychological thriller from bestseller Hoag (The 9th Girl), used to be a Minneapolis TV reporter, until she was captured by the serial killer known as Doc Holiday, who tortured and raped her. Dana managed to escape her tormentor, but she suffers from PTSD as well as a traumatic brain injury that causes her difficulty performing everyday tasks and retrieving words and memories. When Dana returns to her hometown in Indiana to live with her mother and stepfather, reporters ask her about Casey Grant, her best friend since grade school, who mysteriously disappeared the summer after their high school graduation seven years before, never to be found. Dana gets reacquainted with Casey’s old boyfriend, John Villante, whom many locals suspect killed Casey. As her memories of Casey re-emerge, Dana determines to discover what happened to her friend. Hoag fans will appreciate the cameo appearances of detectives Nikki Liska and Sam Kovac from earlier books. Agent: Andrea Cirillo, Jane Rotrosen Agency.

November 1, 2014
In Hoag's (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he's a sheriff's deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John's home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag's first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey's disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana's self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn't include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey's disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana's fiercely protective aunt to Mercer's pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag's narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion. A top-notch psychological thriller.

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Starred review from December 1, 2014
Hoag has been writing nail-biting thrillers for years, but this time she ups the ante. The suspense remains high, but the stakes are even higher as Hoag delves into traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Dana Nolan is a TV reporter who is kidnapped and tortured by a serial killer called Doc Hollidayuntil she kills him. She suffers a traumatic brain injury in the process, as well as psychological damage that will take much longer to heal. The news reporter is now the news story, and she considers herself as Before Dana and After Dana, as if she were two different people. Dana soon realizes that she needs goals in order to move ahead. She starts by trying to relearn her own life, reading her old high-school journal, and slowly her memories start coming back. The summer before college, her best friend, Casey, disappeared, and as Dana looks at her own life, she also looks at Casey's. Casey's old boyfriend, who was always under a cloud of suspicion surrounding Casey's disappearance, is back in town, now a veteran and suffering from PTSD and a brain injury himself. Seven years have passed, and as these two damaged people try to find ways to live a normal life under the most difficult of circumstances, solving the old mystery gives them focus. This unusual take on a serial-killer novel offers a most welcome exploration of traumatic brain injury and what it is like to be a survivor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2014

TV news reporter Dana Nolan, who escaped from a serial killer, still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Is that why everyone looks suspect when she reopens the investigation of her best friend's disappearance after high school graduation?

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 23, 2015
Dana Nolan, Hoag’s newest protagonist (after 2013’s The 9th Girl), may qualify as the ultimate woman in jeopardy. In just the prologue, the former television reporter manages to subdue a sadistic serial rapist and murderer who has put her through a horrific period of torture. The book begins with her leaving the hospital, still scarred mentally and physically, to seek further therapy in the presumably more comfortable Indiana home of her mother and stepfather. Instead of quiet recovery, her well-publicized arrival activates a local cold case—the disappearance of her high school BFF, Casey Grant. Reader Whelan’s narration is soft and whispery, establishing an atmosphere of both intimacy and impending danger as Dana, suffering from a brain injury, struggles to remember any details surrounding Casey’s sudden vanishing that might help. In giving voice to the protagonist, Whelan begins with a credible halting stutter combined with yelps of frustration. Then, as Dana’s therapy kicks in, her speech settles into an infrequently halting, more normal pattern marked by moments of self-doubt and fear. The other characters are equally well served: Dana’s overprotective mother sounds effusively caring and nervously high-strung, her step-
father cold and aloof. Whelan lowers her voice effectively for the novel’s other male characters, including Dana’s high school boyfriend, Tim Carver, now the town’s deputy sheriff, who seems understanding but patronizing, and Casey’s ex-boyfriend, John Villante, a gruff, stoic loner, who is quick to anger and was once suspected of murder. A Dutton hardcover.