Appealing mainly for well-rounded characters, not plot.
In Perry’s latest Daniel Pitt mystery, the young barrister and his friends grapple with a serial killer terrorizing London.
It’s a cold, wet February in 1912 London, and the forecast calls for murder. A thorny assault case has landed on Daniel’s desk, and the second casualty of the so-called Rainy-day Slasher is now in the morgue being examined by Daniel’s friend Dr. Miriam fford Croft, a newly minted pathologist. Lena Madden, the second victim, like the first, Sandrine Bernard, was in her 20s. Like Sandrine, Lena was viciously stabbed, and part of her index finger on her dominant hand was severed. Soon, a third body, that of middle-aged banker Roger Haviland, is found, similarly mutilated. All the crimes occurred during blinding rain, in late afternoon or evening darkness. The police, spearheaded by Daniel’s fellow Cambridge alum Inspector Ian Frobisher, focus their investigation on what, if anything, connected the three in life. Much prevarication ensues as Frobisher and his ad hoc team of Miriam; her boss, Dr. Evelyn Hall; and Daniel mull over whether or not the murders could have been random, committed by more than one person, copycat crimes, etc. The only commonality that emerges, in an information deficit seemingly intended to enhance suspense, is that each victim had been, at one time or another, a Cambridge student. Two were acquainted with suburban vicar Richard Rhodes and his wife, Polly, who also have Cambridge ties. An apparent red herring is Daniel’s new case defending Cambridge history professor Nicholas Wolford, who, in a scuffle over a groundless accusation of plagiarism, broke his accuser’s nose and jaw. Much backstory about Miriam’s and Dr. Eve’s struggles to succeed in a field closed to women, and many interviews among and between the above characters, warmed by those English creature comforts of tea, shortbread, and coal fires, drain tension from the story until the hurried and minimally foreshadowed close.
Appealing mainly for well-rounded characters, not plot.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35873-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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