Authentic period detail compensates for what this overly methodical police procedural lacks in suspense.
Delors’ second fictional chronicle of post-revolutionary Paris (Mistress of the Revolution, 2008) involves a manhunt for would-be assassins of Napoléon Bonaparte.
Roch Miquel, who has risen from humble peasant beginnings to the post of Chief Inspector of the Paris police, owes his success to his fellow Jacobin Minister Fouché. Recently, however, the Jacobins’ republican ideals have fallen out of favor. Napoléon, now Chief Consul, is growing increasingly despotic, and when an “infernal machine” is detonated on Rue Nicaise in the path of Bonaparte’s carriage, Jacobin plotters are immediately suspect. Prefect Dubois, Roch’s supervisor, sees an opportunity to discredit Roch, whom he’s always resented. He arrests Roch’s father, Old Miquel, proprietor of a popular Paris tavern. Roch has a month to apprehend the Rue Nicaise conspirators or Fouché will be toppled, Roch will be disgraced and Old Miquel will be deported to a penal colony in Guiana. Both Roch and Dubois know that the real culprits are royalists, ci-devant (former) aristocrats who want to depose Napoléon and restore the Bourbon monarchy. Amid the chaos and carnage left by the explosion, Roch uncovers his first leads—the body of a street peddler, the carcass of a mare and the remnants of a cart. Apparently the conspirators placed explosives in the cart, handed the horse’s reins to the peddler to hold and lit a fuse before fleeing. The investigation hones in on monarchists Saint-Régent, his valet Short Francis and a mysterious man with gold-rimmed spectacles. All are in hiding, and they have an accomplice, known only as “For the King.” Roch’s investigative zeal is threatened by romantic debacles—he’s learned his mistress’ wealthy husband is actually her father. His childhood sweetheart, Alexandrine, is managing Old Miquel’s tavern—but Roch’s obsession with Blanche has blinded him to Alexandrine’s less racy appeal. Meanwhile, the conspirators continue to elude Roch’s grasp. Is he overlooking something obvious?
Authentic period detail compensates for what this overly methodical police procedural lacks in suspense.Pub Date: July 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95174-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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