Historical fiction at its most enlightening and entertaining; a must-read for American history buffs.
The adventures of Belle Boyd, real-life Civil War scout and spy, come alive in this blend of fact and fiction that takes readers for a ride on the Confederate side.
Filled with hatred for the Union after the man she intended to marry is killed, 17-year-old Isabelle “Belle” Boyd quickly finds revenge by shooting the soldier who raids her house and assaults her mother. News of her notorious act quickly spreads from her hometown of Martinsburg, Va., through Rebel and Union camps alike. While caught between forces, Belle nurses the wounded in the local military hospital—a vocation that ostracizes her from “polite society” even before she moves on to work as a courier, a scout and ultimately a spy for Turner Ashby of the 7th Virginia Cavalry. Along with her keen mind and a rare courage that leads her across battlefields and on midnight rides, Belle finds a crucial asset in her curvy figure, which beguiles many a soldier and officer into giving away Union plans. The fictional narrative moves swiftly along, following well-established facts about the “War Between the States,” and Hamit offers insight into both sides, as well as the perspectives of the African-Americans over whose freedom the war is ostensibly fought. Particularly engaging is Belle’s servant, Eliza, who becomes no mean spy in her own right. The author built this compelling tale from what scanty facts exist about the real Belle Boyd, imbuing believability and gravitas to much of what must be only conjecture. The depictions of ragged, oft-drunken units awaiting orders, the frustrations and disloyalties of angry civilians, and the meetings of exhausted officers within hastily erected tents are so credible, readers feel a bit like spies themselves, listening in. And although the innocence of Belle and her female cousins may initially read as young-adult fiction, this impression slides into an adult sensibility, just as Belle, by necessity, grows stronger, harder and worldlier. She may view her ruined reputation with chagrin, but she wisely turns it to her favor, as her skillful methods of seduction—there’s nothing young adult about these racy scenes—yield valuable information that she successfully smuggles between breasts and under hoop skirts.
Historical fiction at its most enlightening and entertaining; a must-read for American history buffs.Pub Date: May 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-1595959027
Page Count: 433
Publisher: Brass Cannon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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