After a personal tragedy, a righteous Southern lawman wades warily into a racially fraught murder investigation.
September 1955. Department of Justice attorney Carol Quinn visits Sheriff Hickory Blackburn (Beneath Still Waters, 2016, etc.), of Cherokee Crossing, Arkansas, to request his help on an important case. Last year, Hick turned down an opportunity to work with Carol for the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice, staying in Arkansas to raise his two children with Maggie, his wife. Everything changed with Maggie's death; the grief-stricken Hick has mostly been going through the motions ever since. But so heinous is this crime—the shooting of black clergyman Father Grant, who is Hick’s friend, and DOJ attorney Ernest Kelly, followed by the torching of Grant’s church—that Hick feels compelled to help. Kelly is dead, Grant wounded and severely burned. Nicodemus “Deem” Skaggs has confessed to the crime, but Carol is highly skeptical. Though a neighboring sheriff says that Skaggs was “born bad,” an interrogation reveals a more complex personality and possibly a larger conspiracy. Skaggs’ daughter, Lavenia, denies her father’s avowed motive, that he sought revenge on Grant for convincing her to convert to Catholicism. When Skaggs is found hanged in his cell under mysterious circumstances, Carol’s initial instincts seem validated, though proving she’s right becomes harder. After taking care of Kelly’s remains, she’s supposed to return to Washington, but she can’t leave her friend in the lurch. At length she and Hick find the key to the murder in a similar crime, decades old, revealed by a church elder.
Hick’s fourth case posits an all-too-believable scenario and nuanced, relatable characters.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-943075-65-2
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Blank Slate Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | HISTORICAL MYSTERY | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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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
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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