Follett's fans will enjoy this jaunt through the days before England was merry.
Murder, sex, and unholy ambition threaten to overwhelm the glimmers of light in Dark Ages England in this prequel to The Pillars of the Earth (1989).
A Viking raid in 997 C.E. kills Edgar’s one true love, Sungifu, and he vows never to love another—but come on, he’s only 18. The young man is a talented builder who has strong personal values. Weighing the consequences of helping a slave escape, he muses, “Perhaps there were principles more important than the rule of law.” Meanwhile, Lady Ragna is a beautiful French noblewoman who comes to Shiring, marries the local ealdorman, Wilwulf, and starts a family. Much of the action takes place in Dreng’s Ferry, a tiny hamlet with “half a dozen houses and a church.” Dreng is a venal, vicious ferryman who hurls his slave’s newborn child into a river and is only one of several characters whose death readers will eagerly root for. Bishop Wynstan lusts to become an archbishop and will crush anyone who stands in his way. He clashes with Ragna as she announces she is lord of the Vale of Outhen. “Wait!” he says to the people, “Are you going to be ruled by a mere woman?” (Wynstan’s fate is delicious.) Aldred is a kindly monk who harbors an unrequited love for Edgar, who in turn loves Ragna but knows it’s hopeless: Although widowed after Wilwulf’s sudden death, she remains above Edgar’s station. There are plenty of other colorful people in this richly told, complex story: slaves, rapists, fornicators, nobles, murderers, kind and decent people, and men of the cloth with “Whore’s Leprosy.” The plot at its core, though, is boy meets girl—OK, Edgar meets Ragna—and a whole lot of trouble stands in the way of their happiness. They are attractive and sympathetic protagonists, and more’s the pity they’re stuck in the 11th century. Readers may guess the ending well before Page 900—yes, it’s that long—but Follett is a powerful storyteller who will hold their attention anyway.
Follett's fans will enjoy this jaunt through the days before England was merry.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-52-595498-9
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
A complex case fraught with angst and danger ends with surprising revelations.
Webb leaves behind her Birmingham police procedurals to focus on an investigator in Nashville who faces long odds in getting her life back on track.
Finley O’Sullivan is the only child of a powerful local family. She rarely sees her mother, a judge, but she maintains a warm relationship with her father and is blessed with a lifelong friendship with Matthew Quinn, a high-powered lawyer who always has her back. She’s especially treasured that friendship ever since the murder of her husband, Derrick, caused a breakdown that put paid to her job as an assistant district attorney. Instead, Finley’s taken a job as an investigator for alcoholic lawyer Jack Finnegan, an old family friend who’s working on a case that will change her life again. Charles Holmes, who’s in prison for multiple homicides, now claims that the murder of Lance Legard, a big man in the music scene, was not one of his. Lance’s widow, Sophia, hires Jack, her ex-lover, to protect the interests of her twin daughters, Cecelia and Olivia, whose father was suspected of molesting them. Cecelia lives at home and never goes out; Olivia graduated from college and moved to California. Finley still lives in the half-finished house Derrick bought when they married, but now she starts to learn things that shake her faith in him. Messy affairs and a love-hate relationship between the twins are only a few of the things that the highly intuitive Finley must work through to solve the mystery.
A complex case fraught with angst and danger ends with surprising revelations.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3543-9
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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