A vividly imagined tapestry of turbulent times.
Upheaval in Tsarist Russia.
After Napoleon’s army retreated from Russia in 1812, years of brutal war left the populace impoverished, roiling with political unrest, and seething with rebellion. Epstein captures the tensions and contradictions of the time in a dramatic page-turner involving the tsar’s wayward younger son, Grand Duke Felix; Felix’s lover, Sasha, a soldier just returned from the war; and Sofia Azarova, a mesmerizing woman whom Sasha rescues when he finds her prostrate in the snow. Felix is an aristocrat out of central casting: “Tall, strong shouldered, and slim-waisted,” Sasha observes; at 28, “he still looked like a storybook prince.” His imperious father has exiled him to the sumptuous but far-off Catherine Palace, where he can draw on an ample allowance to indulge his “zest for grandeur.” But Felix’s life changes irrevocably when Sasha walks in carrying Sofia in his arms. Beautiful, fascinating, and undeniably charismatic, Sofia entices Felix, as if in a spell. Sasha warns him: There is something uncanny about her. She could be a witch, a vila, an evil spirit. But with Sofia’s arrival, Sasha realizes, “the trust between them had become fragile,” and Felix cannot heed his warning. Nor can Marya resist Sofia’s power. Marya is a member of the rebellious popular movement Koalitsiya, which agitates for “legal protections for workers and peasants, a reformed imperial council, religious freedom, [and] a clear path to emancipation for the country’s twenty million serfs.” Sofia infiltrates the movement, seductively manipulating Marya, at the same time as she insinuates herself into the palace. Violence, betrayal, murder, assassination: Sofia incites mayhem. “This was a woman who could change the shape of the world with a thought,” Marya comes to believe. Epstein interweaves a brisk plot with Eastern European folktales that reveal a vila’s insidious power. Sofia, hardly human, was “like a creature from legend, an ancient spirit hungry to watch something beautiful burn.”
A vividly imagined tapestry of turbulent times.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780385549097
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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