Warts and all, this is escapist historical fiction that expertly renders its setting.
The killing of Harlan Winthrop is almost just a sidebar in this portrait of San Francisco in the tense early days of World War II.
Harlan Winthrop does indeed wind up dead very early on, his lifeless body found in the famous Coit Tower in front of a controversial mural featuring the graffiti “RoBerTo,” supposedly standing for Rome/Berlin/Tokyo. This clearly implicates Axis sympathizers, which launches a very secret investigation led by Tony Bosco, lawyer, former police commissioner, and go-to guy in all such matters. Tony teams up with Dennis Sullivan, a new and hunky hire, and, eventually, sassy Ruthie Adams. Winthrop, though a reactionary—he believed strongly that White Anglo-Saxons were the master race—was still respected; in fact, he was heading up the war bond drive in the city. What the reader learns early on is that he had a very kinky hidden private life. The war informs everything here in 1942. The internment of the Japanese is underway, and German and Italian citizens are suspected in many quarters. Communism (like socialism) is anathema to patriotic citizens, but now we have the embodiment of godless communism, Russia, on the side of the allies! There is also an episode with Tony driving down to Pescadero where his brother, Lorenzo, a priest, has Mexican immigrants in his parish who may be fifth columnists.
What really carries this book is the period atmosphere. The first thing that strikes the reader is how completely suffused the story is with Catholicism. Tony is an ardent Catholic (as are his Irish friends on the San Francisco Police Department), and so is his brother Enzo, of course. The Knights of Columbus is but one of many Catholic organizations that Tony belongs to. Issel is a San Francisco native and history professor emeritus at San Francisco State and has written a couple of scholarly books on Catholicism and politics in mid-20th-century San Francisco. To a bewildered reader, this nonetheless makes a lot of the book seem like gratuitous proselytizing and a bit wearying. But we like Tony anyway, almost as much as he loves his wife and his new Buick Century, “the banker’s hot rod.” Period fashions are lovingly described, as are Italian cuisine and various neighborhoods. On the downside, racism is rampant and casual, true to the times. Tony’s wife, backed by Catholic social thought, does persuade him that “Jap” is a crude and unacceptable term. And to his credit, Tony is not comfortable with the Japanese internment, and he uses his pull to see that a White and Japanese family is not broken apart—not by keeping them out of the camps but by making sure that the White wife joins her husband and daughter in them! Issel is a historian trying his hand at fiction, and it shows. Character exposition is often labored and dialogue stiff, reminiscent of Dragnet. But with the color and ambiance of Chinatown, it’s a wash.
Warts and all, this is escapist historical fiction that expertly renders its setting.Pub Date: July 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-926664-20-3
Page Count: 212
Publisher: BACAT
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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