A neophyte nurse becomes an accidental but effective spy in this gripping adventure.
A world at war isn’t kind to a well-meaning aristocrat in this debut historical romance.
Lady Virginia Whitman, aka Ginger, is a red-haired combat nurse treating the wounded during the British Gaza campaign in May 1917, her contribution to the war effort. Ginger’s life changes when she discovers a badly injured Turkish soldier. Ahmed Bayrak claims to be a Jewish spy for the British who has been uncovered. He tells her there is a traitor in British intelligence and gives her information that she should only hand over to his contact, Lt. Thevshi. Ginger recruits her best friend, nurse Beatrice, and her fiance, surgeon James Clark, to help treat Ahmed while she tracks down Thevshi and tries to identify the mole. The traitor candidates include Ginger’s brother, Henry, who attacks Ahmed; fellow aristocrat Stephen Fisher, whom she rejected in favor of James; and Noah Benson, a mystery man whom she falls hard for. So Ginger must decide whom she can trust, with her head and her heart often battling. Throughout her investigation, the abilities of Ginger, who comprehends World War I’s geopolitics, are denigrated by all the men in her circle. The naïve but tenacious nurse frequently ends up in peril as she seeks to determine which figure crucial to the Entente Powers’ war effort is being targeted by a terrorist called “the Maslukha.” McCormack builds her engaging tale around a clever protagonist who tends to do the right thing even when having to choose among her family, lover, and friends. Still, Ginger understandably ends up conflicted about the Byzantine world of espionage. That said, this being a romance novel, Ginger spends too much time dithering about finding Mr. Right, unnecessarily adding length to a hefty volume. In addition, the most loathsome character is obviously the villain, leaving only the identities of his co-conspirators in doubt. Nevertheless, this is a well-researched book, and McCormack deftly captures the exhausting feel of emergency medicine at the front. Throughout the narrative, the author makes the right choices while leaving loose ends for a potential sequel.
A neophyte nurse becomes an accidental but effective spy in this gripping adventure.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-680950-1
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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