Historical detail, intriguing real-life characters, and a complex mystery are nearly overwhelmed by detailed descriptions of...
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 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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