A welcome return to post-revolutionary Kyiv for another police procedural featuring fledgling investigator Samson Kolechko.
A novice investigator faces more crimes to solve in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution.
This second novel in a series returns to Kyiv in 1919. Less dramatic and violent than its predecessor, The Silver Bone (2024), it portrays a still uncertain but maturing Samson Kolechko in the early days of his career as an improbable police investigator. This time, alongside defrocked priest Sergius Kholodny, he’s pursuing participants in the illegal trade of meat, a precious commodity in a city plagued by material deprivation, whose inhabitants subsist, at best, on pork fat and pies filled with animal intestines. Under constant pressure from his commander, Nayden, and shadowed by Abyazov, an emissary from the Cheka, the dreaded secret police, Samson pursues his investigation fitfully, guided mainly by information he receives from Moses Briskin, the suspected meat dealer who’s hauled from detention for periodic interrogations. A series of thefts from police offices also divert the investigators for a time. Samson finds himself in a deepening relationship with Nadezhda, employed by the Provincial Bureau of Statistics, who’s imperiled by her involvement in a census of railway workers. They seamlessly, and appealingly, make the transition from roommates to awkward romantic partners. Samson remains haunted by the memory of the Cossack attack that took his father’s life and cost him his right ear, retaining the severed body part in a tin of sweets in his flat. For all the bleakness of its characters’ lives, the novel has some lighter moments, like the training session that instructs Samson and Kholodny on the proper technique for blowing cigarette smoke into the faces of interrogation subjects. Though the stakes here are not as high as in its predecessor, Samson is a companionable protagonist who manages to seem both part of the nascent political system and at a slight remove from it, and this story’s conclusion lays the groundwork for future adventures in his grim, but intriguing, world.
A welcome return to post-revolutionary Kyiv for another police procedural featuring fledgling investigator Samson Kolechko.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780063352339
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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