A tangled but rich horror story that imagines a secret occult history of Europe.
A supernatural rivalry fuels World War I in this alternative-history sequel.
Vampire attacks have ravaged St. Petersburg and gutted the Russian royal family. An ancient castle has reappeared on a German mountaintop, and a coven of demon worshippers has just resurrected an entity known as the Death Witch in the body of a teenage girl. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II is desperately seeking a small bottle of blood—so frantically, in fact, that he was willing to orchestrate the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand rather than let his rival find it before he did. (The ghost of the archduke now haunts the Kaiser as an act of posthumous revenge.) The blood belongs to none other than the famous medieval warlock Vlad Drăculea, and the Kaiser believes it will grant immortality to him and his mistress. The bottle is currently in the possession of Vlad’s younger brother, Radu cel Frumos, an immortal witch hunter who has survived the intervening centuries using a series of false identities, the latest of which is the Sommelier. The only thing standing in the way of the Kaiser and the domination of Europe by a cabal of diabolical forces are the Russian vampire hunters Prince Felix Yusupov and Rurik Kozlov, who recently helped prevent great devastation in Russia. A clash is coming, and it will happen in the vicinity of the French city of Arras. Gage excels at unsettling readers through his sharp, startling imagery: “The sound of animal hooves and snorting filled the room, followed by a loud bang. Felix looked up and was astonished to see the officer being gored against the wall by a large boar with sharp tusks. The man looked panicked and surprised as he slid down the wall, finally falling unconscious.” The story takes a while to get rolling, leading with a lot of complex mythology that at times feels weighty or silly. But once things begin in earnest, the tale proves an immersive and monster-filled epic. It turns out the only thing scarier than the vampires and demons is World War I itself.
A tangled but rich horror story that imagines a secret occult history of Europe.Pub Date: March 20, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 654
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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