A solid crime novel with a core of sweetness and nostalgia underneath.
From actor/comedian Cedric the Entertainer, a 1940s crime caper that's also a valentine to his grandfather and his hometown.
Forty-year-old Floyd “Babe” Boyce is a gambler, a fringes-of-the-law entrepreneur, a fixer, a family man, and a central figure in the Black community in post–World War II Caruthersville, Missouri. As the Fourth of July looms in 1948, he and his sidekick, Karter, learn that their Chicago connection for smuggled booze has been liquidated and replaced by a thug with a tantalizing but dangerous offer: not the usual several crates but an entire boxcar of whiskey. The initial problem Babe faces is how to pull together $54,000 posthaste—but he figures he can rely on what he’s always had, a combination of luck with the dice and an ability to tweak the odds with a fast-talking trickster’s wiles. Alas, luck deserts him, and he ends up losing not only his cash, but also the one stake that means everything to his loving wife, Rosie. When, almost simultaneously, a simmering feud with racist rednecks turns deadly, Babe has no choice but to double down, and fast—he decides, with the connivance and the resources of a friend from the war years, to plan and pull a daring midtransit heist. Kyles’ novel isn’t groundbreaking or rich in nuance, but it moves briskly, and it’s fun to see Babe and his crew repeatedly put one over on racists who underestimate or plain fail to see African Americans. According to an author’s note, Kyles based Babe and Rosie on his grandparents, and perhaps the book’s most charming element is its affectionate portrait of their marriage and of this close-knit, vibrant community.
A solid crime novel with a core of sweetness and nostalgia underneath.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780063258990
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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