An engaging and heartfelt tale of two former constables doing the right thing.
Two half siblings chart a new course when their police careers end.
In this follow-up to Lessard’s novel On Duty (2019), the author continues the story of half siblings and Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constables Jasper Nelson and Heidi Finlay. Jasper and Heidi, who met and discovered their relationship as adults, work together in a rural community in the Northwest Territories until their refusal to cooperate with the bootlegging, lies, and corruption of a cabal of civic leaders. Jasper and Heidi survive an assassination attempt and resign their positions. Jasper sinks into depression as his efforts to set the record straight have little success. Heidi takes care of him as he becomes suicidal, and they both seek help from friends and former colleagues—including a minister, who suggests the sabbatical that provides the book’s title. When Jasper seems to be recovering, he suggests a visit to Cathedral Grove in British Columbia (“They have some of the highest and largest trees in the country”). While admiring the trees, Heidi and a friend are stunned to see Jasper mysteriously disappear into the grove. As the search for Jasper goes on without results, Heidi is left wondering whether he has harmed himself or she actually saw supernatural forces at work. Then Heidi reaches her own moment of crisis. Although the novel opens with an article by Jasper explaining the corruption that sets the plot in motion, Heidi’s narration guides most of the story. The book is an easy read, and the vivid descriptions bring the remote and unfamiliar setting to life. Despite the deep themes of morality, religion, and free will, the text is straightforward, focusing on the characters’ experiences rather than the underlying questions. Readers may find the role of Freemasonry in the corruption that upends Jasper’s and Heidi’s lives a bit far-fetched, but it is a minor part of the plot. Readers who are new to Jasper and Heidi’s story will have no trouble starting with this sequel.
An engaging and heartfelt tale of two former constables doing the right thing.Pub Date: July 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-914849-9
Page Count: 102
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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