A meandering mystery with plenty of suspects cleverly weaves the true facts of Annie’s storied life with plenty of...
Annie Oakley travels to England and solves a murder.
In April 1887, the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill Cody embarks for England at the invitation of Queen Victoria. The famous sharpshooter Annie Oakley is the star of the show (Girl with a Gun, 2018), and she boards the steamship State of Nebraska along with her husband and manager, Frank Butler, her horse, Buck, her younger sister, Hulda, and her reporter-friend, Emma Wilson. Amal Bhakta, one of the queen's servants, has been sent to smooth Annie’s way, but the trip proves to be a difficult one, especially after a frantic Buck jumps overboard soon after having received a sedative which has rendered him unable to swim. Frank and Bhakta both end up in the water; Buck is saved but Bhakta does not survive. Both the veterinarian, Mr. Everett, and the physician, Dr. Adams, examine the corpse, and Adams opines that Bhakta died from internal bleeding possibly caused by poison. Frank may have been the target, as some think he is associated with the anti-English Fenian Brotherhood because of his Irish background. Frank tells Annie that he and Bhakta were both pushed overboard, and she is determined to find the truth despite feeling unwell herself and being worried about Hulda, who is still a child determined to act like an adult with the encouragement of Annie’s flamboyant rival, Lillie Smith. Annie had a difficult childhood and was earning money to help her family at an early age; her Quaker background has left her with strong opinions, and she is offended by Lillie’s looser morals. After making some interesting discoveries, Annie accuses passenger Becky Brady, the emotionally unstable niece of infamous Irish nationalist Charles Parnell, of Bhakta’s death. Once in England, Annie, Frank, and Hulda are invited to stay at the palace, where the queen's physician helps cure Frank of his terrible malaise and suggests to Annie that her discomfort is caused by pregnancy, an idea that does not please her. Attempts are made on Victoria’s life, and Annie realizes she was wrong to accuse Becky and must go back and look at a long list of suspects in order to find the real killer.
A meandering mystery with plenty of suspects cleverly weaves the true facts of Annie’s storied life with plenty of historical tidbits.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943006-90-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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