A riveting exploration of a little-known period of Texas history intensified by gut-wrenching depictions of people’s...
A former slave with a highly developed sense of justice risks everything to serve it.
In April 1840, Benjamin January, a Paris-trained physician and music teacher, leaves his family in New Orleans (Cold Bayou, 2018,etc.) to try to rescue Selina Bellinger, a former student of his. Selina ran away with a scoundrel named Seth Javel, who took her to the Republic of Texas and sold her as a slave. January follows, pretending to be the slave valet of his friend Hannibal Sefton, whose ownership will protect him. Accompanying them is tough Kentuckian Abishag Shaw, who terrorizes Javel into revealing the name of Selina’s purchaser, a slave trader who thinks nothing of giving prospective buyers a chance to try out the young women he sells. One of his slaves secretly tells January that Selina was sold to a rancher named Gideon Pollack. They hope to buy Selina back, but before meeting Pollack, they run into Valentina Taggart, a woman they know who turns out to be married to Pollack’s neighbor and knows that January is no slave. Valentina, a wild and stunning young woman who agreed to marry Vin Taggart even though she knew her land was her main attraction, agrees to help, but her freedom to act is hampered by the presence of her husband’s hateful mother and aunt. When Pollack, who denies having bought Selina, is badly wounded in a duel, January uses his medical skills to save him. Rescuing Selina, he sends her on the dangerous trip back to New Orleans while he and Hannibal stay to help Valentina, who’s been accused of murdering her husband. The success of January’s mission requires him to use Hannibal as a frontman to cut through the lies and political intrigue raging in a divided Texas, where land is everything and murder an easy way to improve fortunes.
A riveting exploration of a little-known period of Texas history intensified by gut-wrenching depictions of people’s enduring inhumanity.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8909-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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