A commendable detective story and an immaculate survivor’s tale of the Nazi regime.
In Fields’ debut historical detective novel, a Jewish smuggler’s investigation into a ghetto police officer’s murder in Nazi-occupied Poland exposes him to the horrors of the Holocaust.
In 1941 Poland, a police officer is found dead in the street. He had been working for the Judenrat—Jewish officials enlisted by the occupying Germans—and they look to Aaron Kaminski, a smuggler and an experienced former policeman, to look into the crime. He reluctantly agrees, but he’s unprepared for the atrocities he witnesses, including German soldiers gunning down people in public. Every person Kaminski questions in the course of his investigation—including the officer’s partner, one of his roommates and a rabbi at a synagogue he frequented—leads to reminders of the Nazi presence in Poland. Kaminski is accosted by German soldiers and, at one point, barely escapes a massacre. He also has a mounting suspicion that someone’s following him. What begins as a detective story with a World War II backdrop, however, slowly becomes a story of survival. When Aaron is later captured and tortured, he witnesses the Holocaust firsthand in chilling detail as he tries to stay alive long enough to find the killer. As people steal food and clothing to combat starvation and the blistering cold, the novel is often bleak, but even its darkest elements have glints of optimism; for example, Aaron occasionally has romantic interludes with his common-law wife, Yelena, a smuggler who lives separately from him. The prose resonates with vitality; at one point, Aaron says that his investigation of a single murder is like “looking for a killer in a graveyard,” and “word of mouth” is called “rumor’s pretty cousin.” Although the main murder mystery finally gets resolved, Aaron’s story is left open, to great effect.
A commendable detective story and an immaculate survivor’s tale of the Nazi regime.Pub Date: April 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615732091
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Ars Gratia Pecuniam
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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