The 1900 Paris Exposition provides a glittering backdrop for murder, theft, and high fashion.
Emily Chapman considers herself very fortunate to be in Paris, along with her physician husband and children, as the social secretary for Mrs. Bertha Palmer. Emily never imagined visiting the House of Worth, where Mrs. Palmer has insisted on buying her a costume while ordering her own magnificent wardrobe, fit for the only female commissioner representing the U.S. They’re accompanied by Honoré Palmer and his friend Lord James Lawford, who are transporting Mrs. Palmer’s valuable pearl necklace. Others visiting the same day are wealthy Mrs. Johnstone, her daughter, and two friends, well-known artist Mary Cassatt, and the Countess Olga Zugenev, and her daughter, Sonya. When Mrs. Palmer’s pearls go missing, she’s reluctant to make a fuss until another valuable jewel is stolen at a party celebrating the engagement of M. Worth’s daughter to a son of the house of Cartier. The next day the family meets Inspector Guillaume, who had a similar experience in 1889 with a clever gang of jewel thieves, a gang whose ringleader was never caught. The Palmer pearls turn up on a mannequin at a House of Worth exhibit along with the dead body of a young woman who occasionally worked for Worth. Since the Inspector seems determined to suspect Honoré, Mrs. Palmer, who knows that Emily has solved crimes in the past (Death at Chinatown, 2014, etc.), asks her to prove him innocent. Although she speaks almost no French, Emily can hardly refuse. A second death only spurs her on to help the Palmer family.
Historical detail, intriguing real-life characters, and a complex mystery are nearly overwhelmed by detailed descriptions of period attire that only a hard-core fashionista could love.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-996-75583-2
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Allium Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
21
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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