An engrossing, suspense-filled thriller with an intriguing protagonist.
Rothman and Hicks (Kate and the Kid, 2013, etc.) follow New York attorney Eve Petersen, who struggles to find connections among a disturbed female client with a mysterious past, the untimely deaths of many associated with the case and a serial rapist with a chilling M.O.
Eve, a corporate attorney, somewhat reluctantly takes over her dead mother’s messy legal cases; she had been a lawyer, too. She finds herself out of her depth when she agrees to represent Susan Clymer, a vulnerable young amnesiac who has recently come into a considerable inheritance. Having agreed to help the girl discover the truth about her parents and the early part of her childhood, Petersen soon discovers that, to keep the girl’s past a secret, someone is willing to kill. Meanwhile, both women become the target of a serial rapist calling himself The Gentleman Rapist, who thrives on dominating and humiliating independent, strong-willed victims. Things take an even stranger turn as Susan begins to experience recollections of a past life as a servant girl indentured to a Colonial master during the Revolutionary War. Eve attempts to guard Susan from all those who seem to take an unhealthy interest in her, such as high-profile psychic Madame Rosa, who encourages Susan’s fantastical past life regressions through hypnosis. As Eve gets closer to the truth, the body count rises, and The Gentleman Rapist continues to strike closer and closer to home. Eve is a complex, dynamic character, especially considering her relationship to her recently deceased mother, who had made a point in her own legal practice of pursuing justice for low-income and marginalized clients. Eve becomes increasingly intriguing as she moves further out of her comfort zone as a corporate lawyer to involve herself with the personal, dramatic and often ugly cases she once avoided. However, Rothman and Hicks’ busy and highly detailed subplots, such as those involving local political races or Colonial history, have a tendency to drag things down, while sudden and unlikely plot twists abound.
An engrossing, suspense-filled thriller with an intriguing protagonist.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Barbarian Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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