With sparkling wit, Southern charm, and a steady pace, Miss Lilly has hit her stride.
Lloyd’s (Home Is Where Your Boots Are, 2015) second book in the MisAdventures of Miss Lilly series finds small-town lawyer Lilly Atkins kicking herself after shooting her ex-boyfriend in the foot.
With Cash Stetson in rehab, Lilly might also need therapy to get through a divorce case that brings back unhappy memories of both her cowardly ex-boyfriend and her cheating ex-fiance. Veronica Kellner’s husband is leaving her, and she needs Lilly’s help to secure her children’s inheritance after he’s gone. Soon, Lilly is bruised and bloodied in a series of mishaps—some accidental, some self-inflicted—while she investigates the couple’s secrets. As the danger escalates, Lilly finds that “the best place to find grace is with the people that know all the bad stuff you’ve done.” Lilly is as brazen as ever, and her gaggle of loudmouthed friends ride shotgun as she gossips, trespasses, and steals to get the information she needs while local law officials look the other way. Some clues are laugh-out-loud funny—like the telltale nightie that implicates a woman’s fiance in a crime worse than cheating—and dead bodies are thrown like pies in the face of justice. Lawyer and “former Yankee FBI agent” Spencer Locke, whose uncle Charlie represents Mr. Kellner in the divorce settlement, is powerless to keep Lilly out of trouble when the right side of the law is whatever side she’s standing on at any given moment. Lilly says Spencer is “as bad as Gladys Cobb’s perfume”: “Nauseously permeating and infinitely irritating”—or at least irritating enough to hint at romance without overwhelming the plot. In the previous book, Lilly’s cases piled up on her desk while she cataloged her long history with her hometown friends; in this sequel, each of her new cases feeds into the next until the evidence shows how they are all connected. It’s a formula in which every ingredient has been perfectly measured, and it works. Still, readers who are new to the series could start with this book and quickly catch up.
With sparkling wit, Southern charm, and a steady pace, Miss Lilly has hit her stride.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lloyd Words
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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