by C.C. Humphreys ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2013
Welcome and well-done back story for Humphreys’ likably roguish character.
Forced to flee England after a duel, young scamp Jack Absolute becomes a soldier as he fights with the British army during the French and Indian War, in this prequel to Humphreys’ Jack Absolute series.
Jack takes full advantage of all the seedy delights available to a young student in 18th-century London. He spends late nights carousing and gambling with his friends, and, when not attempting to woo his young French tutor, he finds time to pursue an affair with another man’s kept mistress. Eventually, though, a series of dangerous misadventures find Jack engaged in a duel with his rival and cousin, Craster, while his father, Sir James Absolute, is compelled to duel with Jack’s mistress’s powerful lover in order to preserve the family honor. In the aftermath of the duel, Jack and his father are forced to flee, Sir James to Germany and Jack to Canada, to deliver messages to the British commander in chief, Gen. Wolfe. Jack arrives just in time to help Wolfe take Quebec from the French, but as the battle winds down, he is captured by a group of Native Americans who have allied themselves with the French. Enslaved and held prisoner in the wilds of Canada, Jack must find a way to escape and then make his way through the wilderness to rejoin the British army. The hero Jack Absolute started life as a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, and Humphreys, who once played Jack onstage, transformed him into a swashbuckling soldier and spy in his previous novel, Jack Absolute (2003), to which the current book is a prequel. While the plot, being fairly standard for the genre, yields no big surprises, the action sequences more than compensate. The dialogue is especially well-done, full of wit and style that feel true to the period. There is enough period detail to help draw the reader into the time but not so much as to be distracting.
Welcome and well-done back story for Humphreys’ likably roguish character.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8224-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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