A delightful historical romance featuring a new family of nonconformists to fall in love with.
A young lady attempts to steal a painting but finds she’s nabbed a duke instead.
Most young women trying to sneak into Regency society long to be seen, but Chloe Wynchester is the opposite: She strives to be invisible. She and her siblings, an eclectic group of six orphans adopted by the late Baron Vanderbean, use their unique talents “doing good works beneath people’s noses.” Though most of their missions are altruistic, her latest aim is personal: to liberate a painting that was significant to Bean and is precious to his adopted brood, stolen from them by Lawrence Gosling’s father, the previous Duke of Faircliffe, who had sold it to Bean years ago because he needed the money. She hatches an elaborate plan to steal it back, but the plot is upended when she accidentally kidnaps the duke instead. The timing couldn’t be worse, from Lawrence’s perspective, as he’s sacrificed nearly everything he has to rebuild his family’s reputation and is about to complete his task by proposing marriage to a woman with a large dowry. As his kidnapper, Chloe is all too visible to Lawrence, who assumes she’s a social climber. Needing some reason to keep seeing Lawrence as she searches for the still-missing painting, Chloe convinces him to give her lessons and help her find a wealthy suitor. The attraction between them grows with each lesson, especially when he learns that she’s an avid follower of Parliament and can match him argument for argument. Their first kiss leaves both certain of their chemistry, but Lawrence is still Chloe’s sworn enemy even if he doesn’t know it, and he’s also still set on restoring his dukedom, so even as they fall in love, both struggle to abandon what they’ve always believed and who they pretend to be. There are plenty of steamy scenes, but the emotional center of the book unfolds as Lawrence and Chloe come to care for each other and, for the first time, experience being seen and loved for who they truly are. Though slightly bogged down with exposition, the story is a charming introduction to a new series, and readers will look forward to seeing the next Wynchester meet their match.
A delightful historical romance featuring a new family of nonconformists to fall in love with.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1952-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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