A historically rich and sublime work of crime fiction.
A late-19th-century conciergetries to unmask a murderer before authorities arrest an innocent person in Chamberlin’s mystery.
One morning in 1895, Madame Nathalie Toussaint, in her ground-floor concierge room in Paris, hears a scream and a crash. It’s young housemaid Jeanne-Marie, who just discovered the remains of a murder victim, Monsieur d’Ermenville, at a “fashionable apartment building” in Paris. Police initially suspect both Madame Toussaint and Jeanne-Marie, although it’s clear that the victim, a wealthy male tenant, was not especially well liked. However, authorities seem more certain that the killer is Madame Toussaint’s own late-night “visitor,” who’s not a tenant and has gone missing. She’s convinced he’s innocent, so she sets out on her own investigation while evading police who think she’ll lead them right to their target. This murder stirs up memories from 25 years ago, when Madame Toussaint was one of many Parisians who suffered during the 1870-71 Prussian siege. Digging into what happened on the night in question unearths secrets that gradually bring Madame Toussaint closer to the culprit. Chamberlin skillfully blends a murder mystery with a vivid portrayal of real-world history as the story fluidly alternates between 1895 and the early 1870s. Scenes set in the past are particularly harrowing as Parisians struggle to survive in ruined cities and several characters are revealed to have surprising connections. Madame Toussaint is as sympathetic as she is impressive; she meets her husband-to-be during the Siege of Paris, and her engaging intuition makes her much more than an amateur sleuth. Her subtle interrogations, as the tale oscillates between the past and present, beget a swift pace that rarely lets up. Meanwhile, the real-life events that unfold throughout, from the Dreyfus Affair to the establishment of the 1871 Paris Commune, further enliven an exemplary tale.
A historically rich and sublime work of crime fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781960090874
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Epigraph Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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