Roaming far from the California settings of his earlier novels (With Siberia Comes a Chill, 1991; Black Dragon, 1988), Mitchell reappears with a richly historical, if far-fetched and overwrought, tale of a mad killer loose among the Union Army laying waste to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in the last year of the Civil War. Surgeon Simon Wolfe is Sheridan's Medical Director during a scorched-earth pursuit of a dwindling yet deadly Confederate force, and he deftly manages a logistical nightmare of field hospitals and ambulances in spite of having lost an arm in an earlier engagement. His ethical standards are high, so that when he finds a woman stabbed to death in a burning house he is morally outraged. A witness, the beautiful Rebekka Zelter—belonging, like the victim, to a sect of German pacifists—accepts his care but proves unbalanced by her ordeal; while Simon is about his duties and trying to convince Sheridan to hunt the killer, she opts to strip down and join the corpses in the army morgue. When another murder takes place, Simon puts his career on the line to force an investigation. Censured by Sheridan and sent into battle, he acts heroically, but even though befriended by the Boy General Custer, he faces dismissal—until yet another corpse turns up. Focusing his suspicion on Sheridan, Simon all but takes the law into his own hands when he believes Rebekka in danger. A chance encounter with one of Mosby's Rangers, however, and a brush with death by poisoning provide proof that his witness is much more than a mere observer. Neither the heat of battles well reconstructed nor the many details of a pivotal Civil War campaign can long disguise the implausibility and confusion of this thriller run amok.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10542-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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