More ingenious than Season of Darkness but altogether less striking. Best wait and hope for two out of three.
Now that they’ve bonded over the writing life and homicide investigation, eminent Victorian Charles Dickens and eminence-in-training Wilkie Collins tackle a second case of murder.
No one thinks Edwin Milton-Hayes was a particularly outstanding painter. So why did whoever slashed his throat in his studio take the trouble to slash one of his last paintings, as well? The answer, Dickens swiftly decides, is that Milton-Hayes, whose plummy name isn’t the one he was born with, was a blackmailer with a novel approach. Paintings like The Night Prowler, Forbidden Fruit, Taken in Adultery, Den of Iniquity, Root of All Evil, and Winter of Despair, commissioned by the monumentally clueless Canon Rutter, showed compromising situations in which Milton-Hayes’ society acquaintances had placed themselves, with the actual portraits of subjects, like talented young artist Walter Hamilton, flirtatious wife Molly French, schoolgirl Florence Gummidge and her mother, gallery owner William Jordan, and his wife, Helen, to be revealed later unless the painter's financial demands were met. What’s particularly alarming to Wilkie is that his troubled younger brother, Charley, seems to pop up everywhere Wilkie and Dick look—making Inspector Field, of London’s Detective Force, all but certain that Charley is the killer. As in the Victorian sleuths’ debut (Season of Darkness, 2019), Harrison alternates chapters narrated by Wilkie, who’s constantly fretting over his lack of progress on Hide and Seek, his second novel, with distinctly less successful third-person chapters presented from the viewpoint of Sesina, the fearful, impressionable, curious Collins housemaid. Sadly, Dickens himself cuts a much less impressive figure this time, playing a supporting role till the very last minute, when he’s on hand to pull a rabbit from his hat—a surprise that no doubt pleases him as much as his readers.
More ingenious than Season of Darkness but altogether less striking. Best wait and hope for two out of three.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8912-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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