Smart, atmospheric fun, with enough loose ends left dangling to assure fans there will be more entries in this enjoyable...
Constance Kopp’s real-life adventures as “New Jersey’s first lady deputy sheriff” again make savory grist for Stewart’s fictional mill (Girl Waits with Gun, 2015, etc.).
When we reconnect with Constance in the summer of 1915, she's casually toting a revolver and collaring a male perp, as strong-minded and strong-armed as ever. Constance loves her new job and is grateful to liberal Sheriff Heath for making it possible for her to support her sister, Norma, and 18-year-old Fleurette, who thinks she's their sister but is in fact Constance’s illegitimate daughter. It’s a grievous disappointment to learn that the law enabling women to become police officers doesn’t necessarily apply to sheriff’s deputies and that until Sheriff Heath finds legal precedent for hiring Constance, she’s stuck in a stopgap position as matron at the local jail. Summoned to Hackensack Hospital to translate for Herman von Matthesius, a German-speaking prisoner taken there for allegedly suffering dire symptoms, Constance is at first glad for the excitement but then mortified when he slips away while she guards his door. Not only has she justified the sexist slurs of her former male colleagues, but her slip-up could send Sheriff Heath to jail. Constance determines to track down von Matthesius herself, giving straight-laced Mrs. Heath one more reason to disapprove of her, alongside the possibly accurate suspicion that the lady officer’s feelings for the sheriff are warmer than professional. As was the case in Girl Waits with Gun, plot details are less compelling than our rooting interest in Constance out-detecting all the men (which she does) and in the evocative period atmosphere, this time centered on the mean streets of early-20th-century New York City, where von Matthesius and his confederates lurk. Sharp-tongued Norma and pretty, stage-struck Fleurette head a vivid supporting cast, and the von Matthesius case and a subordinate mystery are satisfyingly wrapped up to Constance’s credit.
Smart, atmospheric fun, with enough loose ends left dangling to assure fans there will be more entries in this enjoyable series.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-40994-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
PERSPECTIVES
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
