Not a page without peril, whether from pistol, blade or rogue.
Bonaparte at war with England provides a backdrop for McGee’s (Hawkwood, 2012, etc.) third Matthew Hawkwood saga.
A Bow Street Runner, "Hawkwood’s world was one of ill-lit streets, thieves’ kitchens, flash houses, rogues and rookeries." Think Regency-era FBI, or England’s Texas Rangers. Hawkwood’s been summoned by his wily, taciturn boss, James Read, to meet Capt. Ludd. England is housing French prisoners of war in "prison hulks" moored in rivers and harbors. Prison hulks are derelict vessels; conditions aboard are ugly, malodorous and unsanitary. Ludd says too many prisoners are disappearing, and he’s lost two lieutenants who were attempting to discover the escape routes. Read sends Hawkwood to learn the fate of the missing investigators. With gut-wrenching descriptions of the rotten conditions aboard the hulks, McGee plunges readers into the action. Hawkwood is relegated to the Rapacious, where Rafalés and Romans—so called because they wear blankets like togas—rule the bottommost decks, led by a wicked albino Corsican named Matisse. Hawkwood, posing as an American officer fighting for the French, befriends a French officer, a privateer captain named Lasseur. Lasseur and Hawkwood challenge Matisse. Matisse dies. Lasseur and Hawkwood are threatened with the noose, but they’re spirited off the hulk by a French underground group. Hawkwood and Read are likable, familiar characters developed over several volumes, but Lasseur is one-dimensional. Nevertheless, McGee’s narrative profits from ample research, and the yarn rapidly gallops off to the wild coastal lands sheltering free traders—smugglers. A handsome widow shelters the pair before they take refuge in an abandoned abbey, the redoubt of the blackguard Morgan, a well-described smuggler king, who threatens the pair into helping hijack gold meant for the Iron Duke’s troops. Hawkwood and Lasseur make more than one hairbreadth escape, rescued at the end by another well-developed regular character, Nathaniel Jago, Hawkwood’s old sergeant who's now sometimes on the wrong side of the law. McGee’s talent and research lend plausibility to the rollicking adventure.
Not a page without peril, whether from pistol, blade or rogue.Pub Date: May 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60598-427-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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