An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case.
Murder in Kyiv in the Bolshevik Revolution’s aftermath.
In the first of a projected series, the prominent Ukrainian novelist Kurkov introduces Samson Kolechko, an unemployed electrical engineer who lands a detective job in 1919, launching him into the investigation of a theft that evolves into the pursuit of a murderer that almost claims his life. After his father is slaughtered in the street by Cossack marauders and his own right ear is severed in the attack, Samson finds himself isolated in his Kyiv flat until some of his space is appropriated by two Red Army soldiers. When he reports their theft of his father’s beloved desk to the local police station, he’s improbably offered a job as a detective to help stem the tide of property crimes in a city that’s roiled by violence in the unsettled aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. With relative swiftness but no small amount of personal peril, Samson follows a trail that eventually leads to the discovery of a theft of silver objects, including the eponymous body part, after he survives an ambush and is nearly murdered alongside a soldier who’d been assisting him and a witness in the case. He’s aided in his pursuit of their killer by his friendship with Nadezhda, a young woman who works in Kyiv’s census office and has become the object of Samson’s romantic interest. Kurkov deepens his story with a vivid portrait of Kyiv that emphasizes the city’s “atmosphere of fear and danger” and considerable material deprivation in the wake of Russia’s epochal political change. Samson and his colleagues must function in what amounts to a barter economy that involves frequent nighttime blackouts caused by the theft of the firewood fueling Kyiv’s power plant, along with food and water shortages. It’s a bleak, but fitting, backdrop to one man’s grimly determined quest for justice.
An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063352285
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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