One of the heroine’s most perilous and exciting adventures features misogyny in every ugly form.
A penance designated for Hildegard of Meaux Abbey brings her into great danger.
England in 1389 is no safe place for anyone, as the great lords fight among themselves over the power rightly belonging to the young Richard II. But it’s even less safe for Hildegard when Abbot Hubert de Courcy, disturbed by her sexual escapade with Sir Ulf of Langbar (Murder at Meaux, 2018, etc.), commands her to go soon after Christmas to Whitby Abbey to try to obtain a holy relic for Meaux. Accompanying her are Brother Luke, a young and innocent monk, and her old friends, the fighting monks Gregory and Egbert. The massive Whitby is home to the dour Benedictines, who are willing to assuage their poverty by selling a lock of hair from Abbess Hild of Whitby. Upon her arrival, Hildegard finds herself in a bidding war with both wealthy religious houses and wealthy lords. Abbot Richmond himself is noncommittal; the place seems to be run by his bursar, Peter Hertilpole, a supercilious type locked in a battle with the poor fisherfolk of the town over payments to the abbey they can’t afford. Hildegard suspects that the relic is actually horsehair, but, loathe to return empty-handed, she and her friends wait for the bidding to proceed. When Brother Aelwyn is found dead in the apple storeroom, Hildegard is first puzzled, then alarmed by the realization that he was murdered even though the monks have chosen to ignore the crime. Another death that follows is also claimed to be accidental, but Hildegard and her friends, acutely aware of the dangerous currents swirling among the monks and the townsfolk, continue to hunt for answers and justice for the dead.
One of the heroine’s most perilous and exciting adventures features misogyny in every ugly form.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8953-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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