An ingeniously plotted fiction debut with well-drawn characters and plenty of historical depth.
In Mulvahill’s debut novel, a socialite/philanthropist hires an art historian/detective to retrieve paintings that Nazis pilfered from her family’s Paris art gallery during WWII.
Nicole (née Cassin), the protagonist of this labyrinthine tale, was an outspoken Parisian girl who hated the occupying Nazis with a passion. The Cassins were Jewish, so it was only a matter of time before the Nazis took away her father and her mother. Despite the Gestapo’s constant presence, Nicole continues to work at the family gallery, now “Aryanized” and run by a small-time opportunist. The German occupiers are initially polite, but soon the brutality surfaces, which prompts Nicole to join the French Resistance. Eventually, the novel turns into a tense nail-biting thriller: Can she keep her membership in the resistance a secret until the arrival of the Allied liberators? Meanwhile, in a postwar flash forward, decades later, art historian/sleuth Robert Ames, hired by Nicole, has managed to locate her former GI lover, Sam Popinski, in a Detroit retirement home. The interview does not go well, and Popinski dies that very night. But the real bomb drops when his son, seeing a snapshot of Popinski before his enlistment, says, “That’s not my father!” But there is an upside: At the retirement home Robert meets young staff psychologist Amy Wexford, and they soon become not just a team of sleuths but lovers. Do they recover the stolen paintings? Well, thanks to modern computer data bases, Robert’s expertise, and Amy’s pluck, the search is not as hopeless as it might seem.
Mulvahill has a visual art background, which she uses to good effect throughout. She is also an imaginative writer capable of turning an original phrase now and again (a village’s destruction had been “meaningless as a domino to be toppled on the way to a pyrrhic victory”). In some ways, the Popinski subplot is even more intriguing than the search for the paintings. When it first begins to seem that there must be a lifelong Popinski imposter somewhere in the bosom of his family, the reader might wonder: How in the world is Mulvahill going to pull this off? We do find out that Robert came by his calling honestly, because his beloved grandfather had not only been a museum curator but also one of the Monuments Men at the tail end of the war, resulting in some moving vignettes and reflections on the futility of war. Robert is also a credible (if secretive) artist, and Amy encourages him to come out of the closet, as it were. The philosophy of art looms large all throughout the novel: Should it be valued as product or process? What about the venality of art dealers and collectors? At one point Robert and Amy have a playful discussion about the value of a work of art versus a human life (to his credit, Robert says that no work of art is worth a human life). But later on, we find out that Robert and Amy’s silly parlor game prefigured a real and tragic choice that Nicole inadvertently had to make.
An ingeniously plotted fiction debut with well-drawn characters and plenty of historical depth.Pub Date: March 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781915023582
Page Count: 296
Publisher: EnvelopeBooks
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
