Industrial London and rural Kent provide the Victorian backgrounds for two fascinating stories of love, hate, and madness.
In 1881 London, the World’s End Bureau takes on two wildly different cases.
After a slow start, sleuthing partners Lily Raynor and Felix Wilbraham are slowly building a reputation and a clientele that are not always to their liking. Now they’re approached by a minister who’s working with a flood of Jewish refugees fleeing Russia after the assassination of Czar Alexander II; he asks them to help an elderly woman whose whole family perished in the pogroms except for her young grandson, Yakov, whom she brought with her to London but who seems to have run away when she was taken to the hospital straight off the boat. A second case involves Jared Spokewright, who insists that his brother, Abel, was wrongly hanged for the murder of the sweetheart, Effie Quittenden, he met while hop-picking in Kent. Posing as a journalist, Felix heads for Crooked Green, where, as it happens, he has a relative, part of the extensive Smith family, while Lily goes to Whitechapel to speak to the Russian grandmother. Virtually everyone Felix meets tells him that Abel was innocent, encouraging him to seek out other suspects. Meanwhile, Lily finds that she’s taken on a very dangerous mission. Yakov is running for his life, pursued by dangerous elements of the Russian secret service who know he carries something more precious than the gold and jewels his grandmother had given him to guard.
Industrial London and rural Kent provide the Victorian backgrounds for two fascinating stories of love, hate, and madness.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7278-2304-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A masterpiece of riveting storytelling.
Set in arid Southern Australia in 1883, this tale of a farming community’s search for a missing child offers intimate human drama, ruminations on the intersections of art and life, and a sweeping, still relevant view of race and class in Australia—and by extension, the U.S.
Six-year-old Denny Wallace wanders off his family farm during a sudden dust storm in the novel’s gorgeously rendered, anxiety-provoking first pages. The next scene, describing a wedding Denny’s sisters happen to be attending in the nearby town, charms with sexy innuendo and mild comedy. The tonal switch, jarring but effective, prepares the reader for plotting and characterizations that repeatedly confound expectations. Organized into the seven days and nights of searching for Denny, the suspense story—will he be found in time?—is a strong foundation for the novel’s larger ambitions. The treacherous beauty of Australia’s landscape comes vividly to life as a metaphor for the multiple human dramas unfolding. Australian-born McFarlane excels at creating a broad perspective on 19th-century Australia. The cast is Dickensian in size, but there are no caricatures. With a line of description here, a snatch of dialogue there, every character develops a fertile interior life: Denny’s sisters and financially strapped parents; the lusty young bride and groom from the wedding; the uncomfortably privileged members of a wealthy ranching family; a visiting Swedish artist and his wife who disagree on art’s relationship to life. Indigenous people, taken for granted by the Whites, play particularly central roles, participating in the search with more skill than the White employers they observe with disdain. Even outsiders, like an Afghan trader passing through, are spotlighted in set-piece monologues. Although at times Denny’s would-be saviors, wrapped up in their private issues, almost forget about him, the boy remains the reader’s point of gravity as he navigates a frightening world with a child’s intuition.
A masterpiece of riveting storytelling.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-60623-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Cambridge graciously declines to offer serious competition to the originality or ingenuity of her famous model.
A prewar-set homage to Agatha Christie’s A Murder Is Announced, with the famous author playing a mostly offstage role.
While she’s waiting for the delivery of the new vacuum cleaner Agatha and her husband, Max Mallowan, have ordered, Phyllida Bright, the housekeeper at Mallowan Hall, opens an invitation to neighboring Beecham House, where “A Murder will Occur / Tonight.” Since Agatha and Max are staying in London, they can’t attend the festivities, but Agatha encourages Phyllida, who by now has quite the reputation as an amateur sleuth, to go in her stead. So Phyllida’s on hand when aspiring theatrical producer Clifton Wokesley, who’s rented Beecham House, announces a Murder Game, lies down to assume the role of the victim, and then never gets up again. Beatrice Wokesley is much too distraught over her husband’s death to be an obvious suspect, but the same allowance can’t be made for any of the other Murder Game performers: divorcée Charity Forrte; Fitchler School headmaster Hubert Dudley-Gore; Beatrice’s ex-fiance, Sir Keller Yardley; and Georges Brixton, whom everyone else accuses of having killed their host. The delayed arrival of DI Cork gives Phyllida plenty of time to take a leading role in Constable Greensticks’ tedious interviews of the suspects and then adjourn to their bedrooms, which she thoroughly searches without authorization. After Brixton predictably removes himself from the suspect list by getting shot, it seems that anyone might be guilty—at least till Phyllida begins to make enough connections to finger the real culprit.
Cambridge graciously declines to offer serious competition to the originality or ingenuity of her famous model.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781496742568
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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