WINTER AT DEATH'S HOTEL

Name: WINTER AT DEATH'S HOTEL
Author: Kenneth Cameron
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8082-5

by Kenneth Cameron ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 6, 2013

Rated R for graphic sexual violence, official corruption and the liberal use of obscenities by figures on both sides of the...

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After his recent resurrection of Jack the Ripper (The Frightened Man, 2009), Cameron crosses the ocean with Arthur Conan Doyle and his indomitable wife and finds, in 1896 New York, an equally depraved killer of women.

As the Doyles arrive at the New Britannic hotel, Louisa Doyle—“Touie” to her husband—sees a Titian-haired young woman crossing the lobby with a handsome young man. The next day, the redheaded woman is horribly dead in the Bowery, mutilated and unidentified. Recognizing her face from a newspaper sketch, Louisa tells Arthur that she’d seen the woman in their hotel. His reaction is affectionate but dismissive: Touie must have been imagining things; she mustn’t make her husband look ridiculous by putting herself forward as “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.” When a sprained ankle maroons Louisa at the New Britannic as Arthur sets off on a lecture tour, she tries to share her knowledge with other people, beginning with New York Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Their reactions are equally dismissive but a lot less affectionate. Given the rampant corruption among the ranks of the NYPD, Louisa’s limited mobility and her equally (and surprisingly) limited exchequer, she won’t be able to shed any light on the Bowery Butcher, whose list of victims grows apace, without some new friends. Fortunately, these include New York Express reporter A.M. Fitch, celebrity actor Henry Irving, pioneering feminist Victoria Woodhull, novelist/spiritualist Marie Corelli and Col. William F. Cody, aka Buffalo Bill. Though she runs rings around the police, Louisa is no great shakes as a detective; the high points in this horrific period tale are the moments when she stands up to a series of condescending males, including, in the treasurable final tableau, her famous husband.

Rated R for graphic sexual violence, official corruption and the liberal use of obscenities by figures on both sides of the law.

Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4022-8082-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.