A promising series debut with engaging characters, social commentary, and a Victorian twist on the ever popular...
Cutler (Guilty as Sin, 2015, etc.) presents two unlikely period sleuths with an unusually freighted missing person case.
Matthew Rowsley is the new land agent for Lord Croft, whose youth and careless attitude do not bode well for his neglected estate. Rowsley’s feeling his way with the suspicious tenants and the upper house staff: Mr. Bowman, the butler; Mrs. Faulkner, the housekeeper; and Mrs. Arden, the cook. Victorian morality is priggish and censorious, and Rowsley, whose parents are an archdeacon and a relatively liberated woman for the times, is appalled at the way the lower classes are treated by their self-appointed betters. When Maggie, one of the younger housemaids, goes missing, the staff is worried, although most of them assume she’s gotten pregnant and run off. Maggie’s mother, who’s squeezed her large family into the gatehouse, disclaims any knowledge of her whereabouts, and since Lord Croft has left suddenly on an extended trip with friends and his mother is also away, Rowsley takes it upon himself to organize a search. As the hunt for the missing maid continues, Rowsley develops an especially close relationship with Mrs. Faulkner, who seems to have secrets of her own. He’s especially unhappy with Theophilus Pounceman, a sanctimonious minister who blames women for leading men into temptation. Rowsley’s prowess on the cricket pitch and his concern for the estate workers earn him some new friendships, and most of them, even the boyfriend Maggie deserted, work to find her. Soon after Rowsley finds a clue to Maggie’s whereabouts, Lord Croft’s new carriage is found smashed and the horses gone, along with Croft and his valet, bringing the police to the estate. Her ladyship, who’s returned home, claims to know nothing, leaving Rowsley and his friends two mysteries to solve.
A promising series debut with engaging characters, social commentary, and a Victorian twist on the ever popular upstairs-downstairs storyline.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8938-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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