Think of the Bridgerton novels with the steamy sex replaced by female-forward action sequences.
Three interlinked stories that give their twin heroines a chance to shine in much more physically active roles than early-19th-century England would ever have allowed.
It seems the fate of 42-year-old spinster Lady Augusta Colebrook to be constantly called on to rescue other women from the clutches of evil men and male-dominated institutions, and the fate of her widowed twin sister, Lady Julia, to be swept along as her accomplice while they keep their snooty and entitled brother, the Earl of Duffield, ever in the dark. After a spirited prologue suggesting a lower-tech James Bond pre-credit sequence, “Till Death Do Us Part” is kicked off by a report from Georgina Randall, an old friend of the twins’ late mother, that Millicent Defray, one of her daughters, suspects Sir Reginald Thorne of having imprisoned his wife, Caroline, Millicent’s sister. Gussie’s plan to find and free Caroline brings her into close contact with Lord Evan Belford, back in England after having been transported to Australia for a fatal duel he fought 20 years ago. The sparks between the two are so quick and hot that it’s no surprise to see Lord Evan, aka Jonathan Hargate, return in “An Unseemly Cure” to help Gussie rescue Marie-Jean, a 12-year-old who’s been kidnapped, kept in a brothel, and offered as a Virgin Cure for the pox, or in “The Madness of Women,” in which Gussie eagerly responds to Lord Evan’s plea to help him spring his sister, Lady Hester Belford, from Bothwell House asylum. All three adventures are marked by successively mounting complications that fans of either the Regency period or take-no-prisoners feminism will cheer.
Think of the Bridgerton novels with the steamy sex replaced by female-forward action sequences.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780593440810
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-488-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Neither the characters nor the mystery makes nearly as much of an impression as the setting and the cuisine.
More accurately, Four Murders Most French, since none of the homicides entangling Julia Child’s circle in postwar Paris seems any more Gallic than the others.
Joining Julia at a tasting during a monthly meeting of her wine club at L’École du Cordon Bleu, her neighbor, friend, and amanuensis Tabitha Knight is on hand to watch Chef Richard Beauchêne taste his very last wine, an 1893 Volnay Clos de la Rougeotte that he samples just before keeling over. Cyanide, thinks Tabitha, whose determination to stay away from anymore murders is on a collision course with her sense that she’s channeling Agatha Christie. Although Inspecteur Étienne Merveille wholeheartedly endorses her reluctance to get involved, she’s left with little choice after she recognizes Louis Loyer at another event as the chef who was arguing with Beauchêne on the evening of his last libation only moments before Loyer uncorks an 1871 Sauternes that turns out to be his last round as well. Assuming that the two poisonings (more will follow) can’t be a coincidence, Tabitha wonders if it’s a coincidence that she’s been on the scene for both of them and begins to make a cautious list of other people who were present for both deaths. Considering that she’s not much more interested in the suspects than her author, Tabitha does a highly effective job of identifying the culprit and tipping her hand in a way that forces her once again to employ her Swiss Army knife to rescue herself from certain death.
Neither the characters nor the mystery makes nearly as much of an impression as the setting and the cuisine.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781496739629
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
