An intriguing and enjoyable game of cat and mouse that involves catching a killer.
In this World War II novel, a cryptic message left on the body of a murder victim in 1942 San Francisco focuses the FBI’s attention on a small group of German sympathizers funded by the Nazi regime.
The body of Charles Brown, former president of the local “America First Committee,” is found in his Hatzfeld Enterprises office. On his corpse is a handwritten sign that reads “Traitor.” Below that are the words “The Grynszpan Group.” The police chief has brought in his go-to investigator for national security matters, former San Francisco Police Commissioner Tony Bosco. DS Dennis Sullivan, who worked with Tony on an earlier case, explains the Grynszpan allusion, which references a young, disgruntled Polish Jewish loner who, in 1938, killed a German Parisian Embassy official. Is this the work of Jewish terrorists? The second member of Tony’s team, Ruthie Fuller, says they must consult with her friend Jacob Weiss, an FBI agent handling Nazi, Fascist, and Communist subversion cases. In a compelling narrative side trip, Issel takes readers back to 1938 to build the poignant backstory for Jacob, the novel’s complex and conflicted lead character. Born in San Francisco, Jacob was raised in Vienna and then relocated to Palestine with his parents and sister after the rise of Hitler. Two years later, his family was murdered by an Arab terrorist in a tragedy that sets the course of the teenager’s life. He joined Capt. Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squad, a contingent of Jewish soldiers recruited to protect Jewish settlers, and Jacob’s experience in the group ultimately led him back to the city of his birth. The author, a history scholar, lays out a vivid, disturbing portrait of San Francisco just entering the war, a city terrified of foreign attacks; rife with antisemitism, racial bigotry, and ethnic discrimination; and politically and socially roiled by anti-immigrant fervor. But his mixture of history, well-paced action scenes, and an entertaining investigation of a series of mysterious murders occasionally becomes subsumed by superficial on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand conversations among the central Jewish characters about Zionism. This is a curious debate given their knowledge, albeit rudimentary, of what is already befalling European Jews.
An intriguing and enjoyable game of cat and mouse that involves catching a killer.Pub Date: May 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-926664-75-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Carleton Street Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.
A luxury liner bound for New York in 1924 becomes the scene of a twisty golden age pastiche.
When an unnamed third-class passenger discovers the body of an elderly man at the bottom of an exterior flight of stairs aboard the Endeavour, Capt. McCrory insists it must be an accident. But James Temple, a Scotland Yard detective who just happens to be aboard, says that no one would have ventured to the outdoor steps in the rain without a coat, so the death should be treated as suspicious. Unable to stop Temple from investigating, McCrory assigns ship’s officer Timothy Birch to accompany him, and Birch promptly becomes the world’s most unwilling Dr. Watson, constantly battling Temple over theories and procedures. Anxious that they have only four days to find a potential killer before the ship docks and lets its 2,000 passengers roam free in New York, he’s especially infuriated at the leisurely pace marked by Temple’s bromide, “Facts before witnesses.” There’s reason to sympathize with Temple, because the suspects in first and second class (the only classes that matter in this ultra-class-conscious world) are cardboard cutouts—the successful banker, his trophy wife, the aspiring artists, the gallery owner—who are much less interesting than the secrets they’re hiding. In his most anachronistic development, author Hindle shows Birch, unlike the imperturbable sidekicks he echoes, sunk in grief over his vanished daughter, Amelia, and his estranged wife, Kate, who left him after Amelia disappeared during one of his ocean voyages. He’d do anything to get his daughter back, he tells Temple, and his determination leads to the biggest surprise of all.
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798217185740
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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