Familiar fare well served in Perry’s plush, comfortable prose.
Barrister Daniel Pitt is thrown into the prosecution of a powerful man accused of a swindle that will remind readers of much more recent times than 1912.
Already thrown off balance by the retirement of his father-in-law, senior partner Marcus fford Croft; his replacement by Gideon Hunter KC; and the elevation of his own brilliant but untried friend Toby Kitteridge to head of chambers, Daniel is knocked off his feet by Hunter’s determination to lead the prosecution of wealthy, socially connected Malcolm Vayne, whose advanced views on women’s suffrage have won him admirers even more numerous than the investors whose money his Big Ben Investments has lost. Convinced that Vayne has been running a Ponzi scheme dependent on endless waves of new investors to pay off the old, Hunter presses Daniel to serve as his junior counsel on the case. The trial is a disaster from the first witness, businessman John Sandemann, who abandons his earlier account about Vayne’s wrongdoings to sing his praises effusively. Vayne’s international liaison Richard Whitnall, a second witness, doesn’t answer the summons to testify because he’s lying on his kitchen floor with a knife in his belly, and others offer testimony a great deal more muted than Hunter and Daniel had been led to expect. The outcome of the trial will be determined largely by two women: Nadine Parnell, the bookkeeper who does her best to lead the jury through the layers upon layers of Vayne’s fraud, and Daniel’s wife, pathologist Miriam Pitt, who could dispel the rumors that Whitnall’s death was a suicide if she hadn’t been kidnapped, driven to Northumberland, and stashed away in a tidal cave.
Familiar fare well served in Perry’s plush, comfortable prose.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593359129
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
IN THE NEWS
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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