The secret is out; a teenage sleuth makes a welcome debut on the crime scene.
In this mystery, an aunt’s deathbed confession compels a high schooler to turn up the heat on a cold case.
Officer Donnie Ray Carr, 26, disappeared without a trace in 1943. Eight years later, “barely seventeen” Gracie Dawson receives shocking news at her Aunt Clara’s hospital deathbed. First, she is told she has a heretofore undisclosed cousin, a little boy. Second, someone named William killed Carr. As to the former, Clara begs, “Find my little boy, Gracie.” As to the latter, all Clara will cryptically say is “Norton Train Station, September 1943.” Gracie’s father happens to be named William; he cheated on her mother, leading to a nasty divorce. But Clara has left everything to Gracie, including her “stupefying secrets,” and so the teen is determined to do right by her. With the help of her boyfriend, Obie Sayer, whose father is the local police chief and who hopes to assume that role someday, she turns amateur sleuth. She visits the Norton Train Station, where Gracie learns somebody left an infant in 1943. Clara is identified as the mother. But who is the father? And is the baby’s paternity connected to Carr’s disappearance? Gracie and Obie’s “after-death meddling” yields a hidden suitcase that contains a birth certificate identifying the illegitimate boy’s father: William Avery Dollarhide, a state senator who’s on “top of the heap” as part of the local foundry empire. McCall reveals this early on, which may frustrate armchair detectives. But this well-written small-town noir is a brisk read that should captivate both YA readers for its plucky teenage hero as well as adults with a penchant for crime stories that revolve around shadowy figures in high places. In this series opener, Gracie is a believable and empathetic character. She is much like Teresa Wright in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Shadow of a Doubt,who discovers, as Gracie puts it, “there’s such a wideness to the world.” Gracie is in over her head but in thrall to the thrill of having been entrusted with her aunt’s confession: “Of course, I don’t really know anything but the idea gives me goosebumps all the same.”
The secret is out; a teenage sleuth makes a welcome debut on the crime scene.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73755-530-8
Page Count: 158
Publisher: JJ Publishers, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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