An exhaustive yet engaging fictionalized account of an absorbing espionage case.
A novel focuses on an American family and Cold War intrigue.
In 1950, Edward Dimock is part of the defense team for Alger Hiss’ second trial. The American government official is accused of spying for the Soviet Union, though the trial is technically for perjury. Is Hiss part of an espionage ring and guilty of perjury, or is he innocent? The jury decides on the former, which sends Hiss to prison. But that is hardly the end of the matter. Many of those involved in the case meet unseemly ends. For instance, a man named Laurence Duggan who could have identified Hiss “if he sang to the FBI, or if he’d been called to testify in the trial” perishes from an “accidental” fall from his office window. Fast-forward to the year 2002. Edward asks his grandson, George, to edit his memoir. Much of the book contains information about the Hiss case. But intrepid George, who almost got a doctorate in astrophysics from Princeton, does some investigating of his own. He teams up with a sprightly artist/rock climbing instructor named Wendy Bradley. Together, George and Wendy dig deeper. As Edward says, there may be many crimes that have gone unrecorded and unpunished, “invisible but shaping the reality we lived through.” At over 900 pages,Cleveland’s book is immense. It is about much more than Hiss and one of his attorneys. There are detailed elements of George’s family. Edward was nearly a Supreme Court nominee. Edward’s son, Teddy, despite his privileged life, enlisted to fight in the Korean War. Then there are numerous historical connections of note. Hiss attended the Yalta Conference with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, was in the same prison at the same time as Hiss. While some fictional elements can weigh the story down (readers learn how Wendy organizes her Brooklyn studio), the portions infused with history are truly compelling. Readers need not buy into grand conspiracies to come away with the idea that, for controversial figures like Hiss, there was a lot more going on than people may ever realize.
An exhaustive yet engaging fictionalized account of an absorbing espionage case.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62634-918-6
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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