A consistently compelling war story that expertly balances multiple plotlines and perspectives.
Rosenthal presents a World War II–era adventure novel, set mostly in the Yucatán jungle in the 1940s.
Early on, a frame story introduces an elderly Solly Meisner living in North Carolina in 2008, exasperating both his daughter, Izzy, and his full-time caregiver with his stubborn independence. During an episode of dementia, he begins to reveal long-kept secrets about his past that lead Izzy, a retired archaeologist, to question everything she think she knows about her family. Most of the story, however, takes place in 1941, in the months before the invasion of Pearl Harbor and shortly after Solly has, by chance, survived a bombing that targeted his band of brigadistas fighting in the Spanish Civil War. A U.S. government agent with the Office of the Coordinator of Information sends Solly to spy on suspected Nazi activity in Mexico, blackmailing him into doing so by threatening to expose Solly’s record as a Communist Party member and revolutionary fighter in Spain. The young lawyer accepts, but he’s certain that the mission will end with his death. In a dilapidated hacienda in the Yucatán, he meets three other Jewish exiles who’ve fled horrors in Europe, some bored expats, and, eventually, Nazi operatives. In addition to chapters from the perspectives of Solly and Izzy, readers get scenes in diary entries of Solly’s aristocratic ex-lover, Estelle, and from the point of view of Grace Weintraub, a Hollywood script doctor. Each narrative voice is distinctive, and the characters and settings throughout are beautifully drawn, from care facilities to remote hotels: “The first-floor patio was abuzz with chatter, a flurry of waiters running around like mad, supplying distraught guests with mineral water or spirits.” The various mysteries unfold at a gratifying pace, and the frame story generates tension between the past and present; readers get action sequences worthy of 1940s Hollywood, as well as an examination of the lingering effects of past choices.
A consistently compelling war story that expertly balances multiple plotlines and perspectives.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781647428501
Page Count: 328
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
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