An exhilarating and utterly unbelievable treasure-hunting tale.
An offbeat operative embarks on a daring plan to recover a massive cache of gold stolen by Nazis and hidden by the Mafia in Collins’ historical thriller.
Adolf Hitler’s tyranny was partly bankrolled by art and gold stolen from the Nazis’ victims, which was worth as much as $120 billion. This novel tells a story in which the soon-to-be-defeated Nazis move that mountain of loot into storage—a complex operation that requires collaboration with Swiss and German banks, the Italian Mafia, and officials in the Vatican, the latter of which is portrayed as being in desperate need of funds. The Mafia commandeers the lion’s share of the booty, and gangster Meyer Lansky—who, in this novel, is a Naples-based Mafia crime boss—arranges to move the gold to a remote mine in Toodoggone, a locale situated in the inhospitable wilderness on the western coast of Canada. In a bid to secure its entry into the European Union, the Turkish government hires Matthew Black to find the treasure and return it to its rightful heirs. Matthew is a “seasoned professional saboteur,” employed by the Organization for the Reorganization of Business, a shadowy and powerful group that “redirects” world affairs when they go awry—a comic-book–style conceit that’s typical of Collins’ entertaining tendency toward cinematic grandiosity. Matthew is opposed by cartoonishly evil players, as well—Global Gold, a corporate front for the Mafia run by the ruthless Marino De la Hora, and Pope Germane himself. Over the course of this novel, the author constructs a tale that’s not very plausible, to be sure, but it is thrilling, and it provides readers with a fascinating tapestry of historical fact, rumor, and unsubstantiated legend. Indeed, the work maintains readers’ interest, in large part because Collins clearly has an impressive grasp of the real-life history that underpins it, which rescues it from feeling like mere fantastical contrivance. It’s also a delightfully action-packed novel, and even if one can’t entirely take it seriously, it remains consistently enjoyable.
An exhilarating and utterly unbelievable treasure-hunting tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 145
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2022
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
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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