In the end, the surprisingly intricate murder plot feels grafted onto the heartfelt evocation of the Texas town.
A mysterious woman’s request for an interview sends a country musician down a long road of reminiscences to the hometown nearly torn apart by a murderer during his boyhood.
No one can identify the young woman whose corpse Kittrell Robertson and his best friend, Whitey Collins, find on a quiet riverbank. But everyone can see that she’s been killed with exceptional ferocity, her breast and ear slashed off after she was bashed to death. Half-Comanche Muskrat Hill marshal Asa Jenkins, feeling out past his depth, naturally turns to Kit’s father for help. Pope Robertson was a famous Texas Ranger before he retired and opened a grocery store, and Jenkins thinks that underneath all that white hair, Robertson’s still got the brains and the tenacity to find the murderer. Before that happens, though, there’ll be two major complications. One is the arrival of Clara Grace, an eccentric cousin of Kit’s mother, Dolly, whose other cousins, Willie Mae and Ralph, have shipped her to Muskrat Hill because they got tired of minding her themselves. Five minutes with Clara Grace, a staunch Catholic with a passion for spreading the word and a lack of social filters that allows her to speak her mind about Baptists, Methodists, and anyone else who looks at her sideways, will make readers deeply sympathetic toward Ralph and Willie Mae. While Dolly does her best to parade possible mates before the uninterested Clara Grace, the second complication unfolds: The killer continues to strike. Inoffensive butcher Oscar Sorenson is gutted and hanged upside down; Miss Maydell, at 30 the town’s old maid, is strangled in an outhouse; and more victims will follow. Jackson (A Season in Hell, 2019, etc.) spends less time on Robertson’s hunt for likely suspects than on limning the town’s rhythms and rituals, goading Robertson’s exasperated outburst: “We have a vicious, crazed killer on the loose, and all I have is a houseful of people who couldn’t care less about it.”
In the end, the surprisingly intricate murder plot feels grafted onto the heartfelt evocation of the Texas town.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4328-6604-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
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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