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
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
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
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