An enticing read, sure to please lovers of historical fiction and political and religious intrigue.
In this debut fictionalized account of Francia in the 740s, the death of a Dark Age ruler pits religions, and brothers, against each other.
The novel opens in the last year of the life of mayor of the palace Charles Martel, who, although not technically a king, has ruled the Frankish empire for decades. His military prowess has allowed him to take over a good portion of western Europe (including what is now Germany and France), but now he’s dying. He breaks his kingdom into three parts, making each of his three sons a mayor of one. One portion goes to his eldest son, Carloman, a Christian zealot; another goes to his middle child, the great warrior Pippin. The final third, which includes the prized city of Paris, goes to his youngest son, Gripho, the half brother of Pippin and Carloman and the product of Charles’s marriage to the pagan Sunni. Martel also has a strong-willed daughter, Trudi, who defiantly opposes her arranged marriage to a Lombardy prince and subsequently falls in love with a Bavarian—and pagan—lord. Although Gripho does his best to act like a good Christian, Carloman suspects that Gripho follows the pagan religion. What follows is political intrigue straight out of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, except that Gleason’s novel is based on stories of real people, and this historical “game of thrones” is engrossing, with fast-paced, crisp prose and smart dialogue. The tale’s real antagonists are religion and the conflicts it breeds; however, at times, the author’s disdain for Christianity comes close to undermining the story’s credulity, as Christian leaders too often come off as cartoonish villains. For example, at one point, the elder bishop, who has Machiavellian designs for power, nonchalantly has sex with a 20-year-old male “acolyte” as he speaks to another member of the church. Gripho desecrates a Christian church and Carloman turns from a principled if overly religious man into a kind of evil Christian crusader. That said, the story is strong enough for readers to overlook these flaws, which, fortunately, are few indeed.
An enticing read, sure to please lovers of historical fiction and political and religious intrigue.Pub Date: July 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475990201
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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