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
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
