More adventures involving gutsy Constance, quietly determined Sheriff Heath, and a lively cast of supporting characters...
Better known for her nonfiction (The Drunken Botanist, 2013, etc.), Stewart crafts a solid, absorbing novel based on real-life events—though they’re unusual enough to seem invented.
Constance Kopp and her sisters, Norma and Fleurette, are driving into Paterson, New Jersey, on a summer day in 1914 when a motor car rams them, splintering their buggy and mildly injuring all three women and their horse. Drunken lout Henry Kaufman thinks that owning a local silk manufacturer entitles him to ignore Constance’s reasonable request that he pay for the damages, but he’s misjudged his opponent. As Constance’s first-person narrative unfolds, we see that she’s a bold woman unafraid to defy convention, determined to see justice done and to protect her family; Fleurette, we learn, is actually Constance’s out-of-wedlock baby, raised as a late-life sibling by her mother. When Henry and his thuggish friends start turning up at the Kopps’ isolated farm, firing guns and sending bricks through the window bearing letters threatening all the sisters but paying particular attention to Fleurette, our tough-minded heroine is not about to be intimidated. She swears out a complaint against Henry, backed up by Sheriff Robert Heath, himself something of a rule-breaker. More threats ensue, as does the complicating factor of a young woman employed at the silk factory who bore Henry’s baby and is convinced he had a hand in the child’s mysterious disappearance. Stewart deftly tangles and then unwinds a complicated plot with nice period detail, and it’s good to see Henry finally get his comeuppance, but the real interest here is rooting for Constance as she refuses to be patronized or reduced to a dependent of her well-meaning brother, who thinks three unmarried women should naturally be living with a male protector. A final scene offers well-deserved new horizons for Constance and hints a series may be in the works.
More adventures involving gutsy Constance, quietly determined Sheriff Heath, and a lively cast of supporting characters would be most welcome.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-40991-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
With any luck, the Nazi hunting will go on for a sequel or two.
Nazi hunters team up with a former bomber pilot to bring a killer known as the Huntress to justice.
In postwar Europe, Ian, a British war correspondent with a vendetta, and his American sidekick, Tony, have set up a shoestring operation to catch the war criminals who seem to be not just slipping, but swarming through the cracks. The same set of circumstances that led Ian to enter a marriage of convenience with Nina, a Siberian former bomber pilot, has also given both common cause: to chase down Lorelei Vogt, a Nazi known as the Huntress, who, by her lakeside lair in Poland, trapped and killed refugees, many of them children. Lorelei’s mother, blandished by Tony, reveals that her daughter immigrated to Boston. Meanwhile, Jordan, an aspiring photographer living in Boston with her widowed antiques-dealer father, Dan, welcomes a new stepmother, Austrian refugee Anneliese, and her 4-year-old daughter, Ruth. Jordan soon grows suspicious of Dan’s new bride: A candid shot captures Anneliese’s furtive “cruel” glance—and there’s that swastika charm hidden in her wedding bouquet. However, Anneliese manages to quell Jordan’s suspicions by confessing part of the truth: that Ruth is not really her daughter but a war orphan. That Jordan’s suspicions are so easily allayed strains credulity, especially since the reader is almost immediately aware that Anneliese is the Huntress in disguise. The suspense lies in how long it’s going to take Ian and company to track her down and what the impact will be on Jordan and Ruth when they do. Well-researched and vivid segments are interspersed detailing Nina’s backstory as one of Russia’s sizable force of female combat pilots (dubbed The Night Witches by the Germans), establishing her as a fierce yet vulnerable antecedent to Lisbeth Salander. Quinn’s language is evocative of the period, and her characters are good literary company.
With any luck, the Nazi hunting will go on for a sequel or two.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-274037-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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