An entertaining but overstuffed fantasy.
In the third installment of the Rook Files series, new recruits to secret supernatural protection agency the Checquy, all of them women, contend with Nazi killers.
Alternating between 1940 and the present, the book opens during the London Blitz. Three young Checquy agents with special powers are "standing" in the sky 10,000 feet above the beleaguered city—one of them has the ability to alter gravity—when a Nazi bomber comes into view. Violating strict rules against interfering with normal military operations (as opposed to warding off supernatural enemies), the headstrong Pamela breaks away from her cohorts and causes the plane to implode by sending a ferocious pulse through it. The women assume everyone aboard perished, but a crew member survives and subsequently goes on a killing spree down in London. Pamela and Usha, both apprentices, and Bridget, a fully-fledged Pawn, must track him down before he kills again—and Pamela's illicit actions are revealed. Decades later, a librarian named Lyn has her life as a wife and mother upended after a freak fire in her kitchen proves to be a manifestation of her long-dormant electrical powers. Recruited by the Checquy and trained in a hidden island academy, she is sent into the field, where she herself becomes wanted for murder based on brandinglike effects on the victims. With a relaxed style and array of fun characters, including an agent who makes people who look at him see their mother and a baby goat that turns into a little boy, O'Malley's latest will appeal to his many followers. Other readers may grow impatient with the time he spends in setup and background modes. After the nifty opening scene, nothing much happens for a good half of the book's nearly 700 pages.
An entertaining but overstuffed fantasy.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-56155-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Hair-raising fun!
Two strange deaths in the desert pose tough questions in this fifth Nora Kelly adventure.
In a remote section of New Mexico, a woman walks alone into the blistering desert heat. In a trance, she ignores her horrific thirst and discards her clothing, piece by piece, until she lies down and dies. Five years later, a video crew with a drone discovers her skeletal remains, which they promptly report. Agent Corrie Swanson is part of an FBI team that heads out into the bleak badlands to investigate. She shares a photo with anthropologist Nora Kelly, who is especially intrigued by the pair of rare green lightning stones found under the skeleton. The woman died with perfect health, yet no one had reported her missing. DNA confirms the 40-ish woman was Molly Vine, an apparently vibrant person who “wouldn’t just throw her life away.” Then the FBI finds another body, another woman, same trail of clothing and pair of green lightning stones, but her death is much more recent. And that’s just the beginning of a tale that gets curiouser and curiouser with discoveries of ancient mass murders and modern mind control. Corrie and Nora are a perfect pair: smart and professional, and with bravery they will need in abundance. At one point, they compare approaches: As an anthropologist, Nora is trained not to judge; as an FBI agent, Corrie is trained to judge. As they delve into the investigation, Nora’s younger brother, Skip, and his billionaire buddy, Edison Nash, complicate matters immensely. They decide to go camping and investigate on their own, and Skip reminds Nash that taking ancient artifacts like an obsidian arrowhead is a felony. But as strange shadows lurk around their faded campfire at night, they learn that getting in trouble with the law is the least of their worries. The landscape imbues a special flavor to this engrossing yarn—the adobe kivas with signs of thousand-year-old murders, the slot canyons, the changing terrain as desert yields to ponderosa pine—and the sandstorms that can abort a rescue. In this setting, an unknown enemy causes cringeworthy violence that the heroes may have to face alone. But as Corrie tells Nora, “We’ve got a gun. We’ve got a knife. Now we need a plan.”
Hair-raising fun!Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781538765821
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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