A vigorous and immersive vampire tale set against the twilight of the Romanovs.
An alternative history horror novel reimagines the fall of the Romanovs.
In December 1916, members of the Russian imperial family are prisoners in their own palace as the country teeters on the brink of revolution. The empress Alexandra and her son, Alexei, are plagued by a mysterious disease that causes them to crave blood and abhor sunlight. Alexei is visited in his sleep by “the shadow man,” who bids him to kill his father, Czar Nicholas. Meanwhile, an apocalyptic cult called the Khlysts has been appearing in St. Petersburg in growing numbers—and rumor has it that its members include some close to the imperial family. A strannik, or religious pilgrim, named Grigori Rasputin arrives in the city on a train from Bucharest carrying no papers or baggage. He has returned to oversee a venture he began long ago with the kidnapping of Alexandra—a plan of great consequence to Rasputin and his coven of vampires. St. Petersburg coroner Rurik Kozlov is convinced that the murdered bodies passing through his lab are the work of the Sleepwalker, a serial killer operating in Romania two decades earlier, though the local authorities are unwilling to admit as much. Rurik knows that there has been a hunt for evidence of Desmodus draculae—the god of the Khlysts—for years. In Rurik’s quest to stop the evil force, he finds an ally in Prince Felix Yusupov, the loving uncle of Alexei. If they fail, it is not only the Romanovs who will suffer, but all of Russia—and maybe the world. Gage’s prose is well calibrated for this Gothic series opener, blending imperial courtliness with vampire grisliness. “You will see I am a man of truth when your carriage crosses the Liteyny Bridge and continues up Bolshoy Sampsonievskiy,” Rasputin warns two aristocratic sisters upon meeting them. “Far outside of Saint Petersburg there is a cabin in the woods where your murderers await to hack you to bits.” There are a few moments when the book’s violence slides into poor taste, but on the whole, the story is a highly satisfying merging of horror and political milieus, wringing a bit of fun—and a whole lot of blood—out of one of the most chaotic and tragic periods of modern history.
A vigorous and immersive vampire tale set against the twilight of the Romanovs.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-62713-7
Page Count: 438
Publisher: KDK 12, Inc
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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