Sherlock Holmes expert Davies (The Veiled Detective, 2004, etc.) effectively captures the London of a later era in this taut...
A fledgling private detective in wartime London tries to save a wary urchin while solving an unsavory case.
In 1939, an accident on the rifle range costs Johnny Hawke an eye and puts an abrupt end to his army career. With no prospects and a yearning for adventure, he opens Hawke Investigations. An intertwined first-person narrative follows a little boy named Peter as he runs away from his prostitute mother. Hawke takes him in, but the skittish boy empties Hawke’s wallet and takes off in the middle of the night. Their paths cross several more times through Hawke’s first big case, which he gets with the help of Scotland Yard pal David Llewellyn. The Palfreys, a colorless couple, want help finding their missing daughter, Pamela, who worked for solicitor Leo Epstein. Pictures show a plain and conservative young woman, but Epstein’s typist, Eve Kendal, remembers Pamela as a beautiful and provocatively dressed girl with heavy makeup. Epstein slept with her, and she used her sexuality to gain a foothold in the lowest rungs of the movie business, at Renown Pictures. When Pamela is found stabbed to death, suspicion falls on her boyfriend, Samuel Fraser, but Hawke finds likelier suspects when he digs deeper into the girl’s dangerous life.
Sherlock Holmes expert Davies (The Veiled Detective, 2004, etc.) effectively captures the London of a later era in this taut page-turner.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36000-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A somewhat entertaining but mostly predictable story; Champagne fans and readers who can’t get enough WWII fiction will...
Harmel (The Room on Rue Amélie, 2018, etc.) returns with another historical novel set in France during World War II.
This novel alternates between 1940 at the Chauveau Champagne winery near Reims as the German occupation begins and the present day in the same area, where recently divorced Liv Kent’s 99-year-old grandmother, Edith, has brought her so that Edith can attend to some “business.” Gradually Liv begins to understand they are in Reims so she can learn what happened in 1940 that changed the futures of her grandparents, their friends, and the Chauveau winery. She discerns this in part from the new man in her life, Julien, grandson and partner of Edith’s longtime lawyer. Harmel weaves in real historical figures such as Otto Klaebisch, the “weinführer” in Champagne during the war, and Count Robert-Jean de Vogüé, Resistance leader and head of Moët & Chandon. The story of fictional Resistance member and Champagne proprietor Michel Chauveau may be realistic, but parts of the story about his young wife, Inès, are less convincing. The Chauveaus employ winemaker Theo Laurent, whose wife Céline’s family is Jewish. While Inès’ naïve insistence that Céline’s family is far from danger is somewhat understandable—many people were unable to believe what was happening at the time—it doesn’t square with her recollection of her WWI veteran father insisting “You can never trust the Huns!” Inès’ vacillating sympathies might reflect her youth, but they set up a chain of events that leads to dramatic changes in her life, which in turn set up the dramatic unveiling of Edith’s secrets in the modern section of the book. All of which requires suspension of disbelief. Liv’s love interest, while sudden, is somewhat more believable, as is Edith’s reluctance to tell Liv the family history. Even in those sections, Harmel resorts to formulaic moments, such as a mix-up about whether Julien is married and a scene where a character is welcomed to heaven with forgiving words from other characters.
A somewhat entertaining but mostly predictable story; Champagne fans and readers who can’t get enough WWII fiction will probably still enjoy it.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1229-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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