This historical tour de force reminds readers who come for the mystery that life hasn’t changed for the disenfranchised.
A thief-taker—someone hired to “find what had been stolen and return it for a fee”—and his assistant risk their lives to help friends.
In 1822, Leeds is already crowded with factories staffed by the desperately poor, and the wealthy owners are worried about revolution. Although thief-taker Simon Westow and his wife, Rosie, understand what it’s like to have nothing, they’ve made a good life for themselves, their twin boys, and Simon’s assistant, Jane, who lives in their house. Simon and Rosie know nothing of Jane’s past but recognize her ghostlike abilities and her skill with a knife as valuable assets in solving mysteries (The Hanging Psalm, 2018). Siblings Emily and Davey Ashton often fed and housed Simon when he was a penniless teen. So when Davey, who dreams of equality, is arrested for sedition, Simon will stop at nothing to save him. Ambitious magistrate Thomas Curzon seems to be spying on and arresting people who protest the awful conditions they must endure; his vicious bodyguard, Whittaker, does the dirty work. Busy with well-paid jobs of recovering stolen property from people like Charlotte Winter, a hocus girl who drugs men and steals their valuables, Simon resolves to track down the spy who helps Curzon get people arrested on bogus charges. In this he’s helped by Jane’s uncanny ability to know when she’s being followed. He finally hears about Dodd, a mysterious suspect who’s traveling with a woman. But this intelligence comes too late to stop Whittaker from going on a killing spree simply because he enjoys it. Soon after Jane removes her savings from a box she’d hidden in the woods and brings it to the home of Catherine Shields, a motherly woman who's the only person she loves, she sees Charlotte digging up the empty box. When Catherine, who refuses to reveal the hiding place, is beaten by the thief, Jane cannot fathom how anyone could know her secret. Using every resource at their command, she and Simon work to free Davey and take revenge on the people who are killing to cover up myriad crimes.
This historical tour de force reminds readers who come for the mystery that life hasn’t changed for the disenfranchised.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8935-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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