A cynical story about how, in the absence of moral courage, terror and self-preservation can also be powerful motivators.
Sympathy may be a virtue, but it can also get you into plenty of trouble.
The author, who established himself as a maker of intricate puzzles with his first novel, The Quincunx (1989), provides another in this wartime tale of a family’s efforts to protect a young girl from a vicious enemy. This is not a portrait of World War II Europe or a fictionalized account of Anne Frank’s life. Palliser is interested less in external details than in the situation’s psychological aspect, exploring the pressures building inside an ordinary family plunged into an extraordinary situation. The narrator, an unnamed bookkeeper in an unnamed European city, describes the invasion of his country and the way one of his younger daughter’s schoolmates comes to live with them. The girl’s wealthy parents, who are on a trip, have been cut off by the invasion. The narrator feels sorry for her, but his feelings are hardly altruistic. He hopes the girl’s father “would be so grateful that he would reward me with a well-paid post” when he returns. The girl, who seems appreciative at first, proves to be a master manipulator with a “mere veneer of charm” who sets the family members against each other. Though they realize they’ve made a mistake, they hesitate to send her home. They’ve already told too many lies to snooping neighbors and worry about being found out. They also cling to the hope of getting a reward even when it’s clear this isn’t going to happen. The girl belongs to an unspecified ethnic community targeted for destruction by the country’s new “puppet dictatorship,” whose sinister plan is hidden behind a seemingly beneficial agenda. Palliser gradually tightens the screws in various ways and the family keeps hiding the girl not out of any deep moral sense but because it’s too late to do anything else. Some readers may feel this plot could have been explored in a novella or short story, but Palliser manages to keep up the tension as his narrative drives to its tragic, unsettling end.
A cynical story about how, in the absence of moral courage, terror and self-preservation can also be powerful motivators.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771838856
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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