An intriguing war thriller hampered by a shaky plot.
A young man of Indian descent trying to make his mark in London’s financial market gets drawn into the horrors of World War I in this novel.
Firoze Hazari finds himself in a bind. He has just completed his studies at Oxford and his parents now want him to return to India to join the family business and marry the “perfect bride” they have found for him. While he’s not ready to settle down, he needs to establish an independent income to remain in London. At first, he finds some success working at the Wilneck Group, a major investment firm. But Firoze suffers from the isolation of a foreigner in a nation that resists fully accepting him, a personal crisis that only intensifies once his company is defrauded. The firm fires him, turning him into its “sacrificial lamb.” Moreover, he frets anxiously about the increasingly inevitable eruption of war. In dire financial straits, Firoze is recruited into The Pannonian, a counterespionage agency, and is eventually thrust into the war as an operative. Chowdhury intelligently captures the volatility of London in advance of the war and the stubborn refusal of some, despite the warning signs, to acknowledge its likelihood. He deftly injects many rich historical details into the story. But the plot as a whole is infused with a didactic quality, as if the author is straining to impart moral edification to readers. This sermonizing earnestness is only exacerbated by the fact that the lesson remains bewilderingly unclear given the murkiness of Chowdhury’s writing. Firoze’s anxiety about the upcoming war is depicted by the author in confusingly muddled terms typical of his uneven prose: “The paradox in his subconscious could not find any way to simply define itself, nor could it be understood completely. A poor tolerance of any rationale to differentiate the racist against his non-British roots, or fascist opinions that comprised of everything he despised, could not be tolerated.”
An intriguing war thriller hampered by a shaky plot.Pub Date: March 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66-321816-2
Page Count: 242
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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