Another complex and compellingly readable historic thriller from Lawton, full of profound questions and memorable characters.
Inspector Troy probes a murder with tangled roots in the recently ended Second World War.
The seventh Frederick Troy thriller (Second Violin, 2008, etc.) brings the London DCI in for the second half of the story. London, 1948. Viktor Rosen shares with mentor André Skolnik his intention to leave the Communist Party. André firmly advises that the Party doesn't work that way. Story flashes back to Vienna in 1934, where Viktor, a Jew in exile from Germany, is the mentor of cello prodigy Méret Voytek, just ten years old. His cloudy past is said to have involved an escape from the Nazis. The German war machine is headed east, a reality that Méret's parents try to shield from her. One day, Viktor simply vanishes. Méret joins the Vienna Youth Orchestra and, not long after, the Orchestra becomes an arm of the Hitler Youth. On her 20th birthday, she is taking the train home when she has the bad luck to see her friend Roberto shot by Nazis. In short order, both Méret and fellow musician Magda are arrested and ultimately end up at Auschwitz. Their musical artistry allows them to survive. When Méret pines for her beautiful cello, it's brought to her; she realizes with horror that her parents must be dead. Eventually, Méret and Magda are rescued (though later separated) by Russian soldiers. Méret lands in Paris, where she lives among artists for awhile, until the time comes to repay her rescuers. Most of the first half of the novel deals with Méret, but there's some tracking of Viktor as a spy in London, as well as Hungarian scientist Dr. Karel Szabo, transplanted to New Mexico to help develop the atomic bomb. Days after the prologue meeting between Viktor and André, the latter is found murdered in his art studio and Troy catches the case.
Another complex and compellingly readable historic thriller from Lawton, full of profound questions and memorable characters.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1956-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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