A very Victorian murder, the evils of British imperialism and a beloved novelist unite in this appealing literary mystery.
Charlotte Brontë is drawn into a web of political intrigue in the latest novel from Rowland, author of the Sano Ichiro series (The Snow Empress, 2007, etc.).
The cherished isolation of Haworth is disturbed when Charlotte receives an alarming letter regarding her publishing career. She decides the only way to straighten out the mess is to present her real self to her publisher, with sister Anne in tow. Charlotte’s other sister, Emily, furious that their pseudonyms are to be revealed, storms off to stalk the moors. As soon as Charlotte and Anne board the train for London, their adventure begins in the form of Isabel White, a governess of modest means and highly peculiar manner. Miss White seems to be escaping something, and not long after they arrive in London, Charlotte witnesses Miss White’s murder. The killing, far from another example of London’s violence, is instead part of a conspiracy of international proportions. Charlotte must team up with Mr. Slade, a spy for Her Majesty’s Foreign Office, in order to save herself and her family (all have been threatened with death) and capture the villain. After dodging bad men and traveling to the Continent and back, Charlotte discovers the mastermind prepared to topple the British Crown: the seductive Kuan. Seeking to put an end to the British opium trade that has crippled China, Kuan plots treacherous schemes that include the kidnapping of the royal children. Along the way Charlotte falls in love with Mr. Slade; her ruined brother Branwell redeems himself; and the fragile Emily leaves Haworth to do a bit of spying at a school that secretly trains its girls for prostitution. If at times the pursuit of Kuan seems, well, Victorian in its countless plot turns, Rowland offers an attractive counterpoint in her portrayal of the Brontë clan and their family dynamics.
A very Victorian murder, the evils of British imperialism and a beloved novelist unite in this appealing literary mystery.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-69030-033-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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