A tale delivers an escape to gorgeous Carmel and an engaging mystery.
In this whodunit set in 1924, a famous painter in Carmel, California, is found dead on the beach and the authorities claim that she killed herself.
Sarah Cunningham is the doubting sister who has always lived in artist Ada Belle Davenport’s shadow. While conflicted, she is still determined to do right by her big sister. Alvin Judd, a bumptious marshal, conducted the inquest into Ada’s death with unseemly haste before Sarah could get to California from Paris, where she herself is an artist. She isn’t buying the suicide report. There are other doubters. One is Rosie McCann, a bit of a Miss Marple, who is sure that Ada was murdered and is willing to help. Then there is the mysterious Sirena Kassajara-Silvia, who is a walking web of lies; the unscrupulous gallery owner Paul deVrais, whom Ada recently cut ties with; and the dreamboat Robert Pierce, a professional photographer whom Sarah is falling for. Throw in fake suicide notes, forged paintings, and the fact that Ada was pregnant and excited to marry her lover, the actor Alain Delacroix, and things get really interesting. Sarah is living in Ada’s house with her sister’s Jack Russell terrier, Albert, a bit of a sleuth himself. Scary things happen in that house. True to trope, the climactic scene has the hero fighting for her life. Of course, Ada was murdered; the clues are a bit of a murky mix; and readers may suss out the killer before the climax. But FitzPatrick keeps the pot stirred nicely, with revelations popping up like whack-a-mole. There is also a nice sense of scene, capturing this idyllic place on the Monterey peninsula. And the author brings in subthemes, like the racial animosity toward the Japanese (Sirena is half Japanese), which is cringingly portrayed; the rampant male chauvinism of art critics; and the influence of the rumrunners (this is Prohibition, but the taps seem to be wide open in Carmel and Monterey). While FitzPatrick is not in the first rank of crime novelists, she weaves a satisfying story.
A tale delivers an escape to gorgeous Carmel and an engaging mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64-742169-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.
The true story of Axis diplomats detained in the U.S. at the start of World War II is transformed into a dazzling historical novel set at a sumptuous West Virginia hotel.
Bestselling YA fantasy author Stiefvater’s adult debut introduces a writer whose prodigious imagination and distinctive prose style have combined to create a novel that will remind readers of why they fell in love with reading in the first place. At its center is the captivating June Hudson, an erstwhile Appalachian orphan who was taken in by the wealthy Gilfoyle family, owners of the Avallon Hotel & Spa, a high-society retreat built over underground mineral springs. At his death, the patriarch bequeathed ownership to his playboy son, Edgar, but made June the general manager, as she had spent her life learning the business—and also shared with Gilfoyle Sr. a rare gift relating to the “sweetwater” springs, a fantastical element of this otherwise realistic novel. Aside from the magical waters and a few other fanciful details, Stiefvater’s fictional world is based on extensive research into high-end hotels of the period, creating a version of luxury so appealing that readers will wish they could check into the Avallon and stay on indefinitely. In fact, the novel revolves around the true meaning of luxury. To June, it has nothing to do with wealth; it is more connected to joy, and to the book’s title: “June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury.” Also brilliantly managed is the rest of the ensemble cast: sexy FBI agents; June’s inimitable staff; the delegations of Japanese, Germans, and Italians detained at the hotel, some quite nasty, but among them a strange, special, totally silent child. And on top of all this, a delicious love story!
This luxurious novel is set to take the world by storm.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593655504
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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