An effective western thriller graced by a memorable protagonist.
An Indigenous soldier faces danger from both humans and monsters in his last mission for the United States Army in Buzan’s novel.
In 1872, a unit of U.S. troops heads to Oregon by train carrying gold meant for the U.S. Army. A Nez Perce man named Jolon Winterhawk is a cavalry soldier and Civil War veteran nearing the end of his career in the military; he’s eager to retire but feels a sense of foreboding. The train is ambushed by vigilante Ramòn Cornadez and a band of soldiers, who mean to take the gold to Mexico. The ambush is violent, and Winterhawk is the sole survivor. Meanwhile, a massive creature is attacking men in the region. Winterhawk doesn’t know about this danger—he assumes the cries he hears in the distance are wolves—but he makes a decision to follow protocol instead of fleeing the scene, meaning he must take care of the dead and, to complete his final mission as a soldier, deliver the gold to its intended destination. Two days after he sets off with the gold, a couple of U.S. Army officers, Maj. Ambrose Toomey and Cpt. Thomas Isbell, find the wreckage of the train and conclude that a traitor turned on his unit; the new arrivals don’t trust Winterhawk because he’s Indigenous and assume he’s trying to steal the gold (“What was your plan, Lieutenant Winterhawk? You made a deal with General Cornadez? You provided him with the train route in exchange for half of the money?”). Ultimately, Toomey and Isbell decide to steal the gold for themselves. Winterhawk remains determined to carry out his mission, but can he escape both his human antagonists and the monster in the woods? The novel is part western and part horror, and some of the violence is extreme. The pacing is not quite right; the author sometimes interrupts action sequences to deliver exposition or historical information. The text includes copious period detail, and a lot of this material is compelling, but as a result the book sometimes reads more like a history textbook than novel. Still, it’s a tense, exciting adventure, and Winterhawk is a charismatic and honorable hero.
An effective western thriller graced by a memorable protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781685132507
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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