Famous figures of the period spice up a fine mystery that takes on a problem still making headlines.
A shocking #MeToo story set in an era when women had no chance of being believed.
Private detective Mary Handley (Last Stop in Brooklyn, 2018, etc.) has married reporter Harper Lloyd. Since their baby girl, Josephine George Handley, arrived in March 1896, Mary’s cut back on detecting. But she maintains in office in the bookstore of her friend Lazlo, and that’s where William Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, asks her to help him recover a stolen manuscript. Mary agrees to deliver the $4,000 the thieves have demanded to a meeting place in Prospect Park. The sellers never show, but someone accosts Mary as she leaves the park and tries to steal the money. Mary, who has a black belt in jujitsu, easily overpowers him, but she’s attacked from behind by someone else and awakens to find her husband—whom she'd left at home, writing and watching Josie—shot dead. Blaming herself, she’s devastated until her friend Patrick Campbell, a retired police chief, visits and encourages her to use her skills to find the men who killed her Harper. Meanwhile, Mary's acquaintance with Theodore Roosevelt, who as president of the police commission is determined to root out corruption, entangles her in the case of Stanford White and James Breese, respected society figures accused of drugging and raping a 15-year-old. The police, who don’t believe the girl, have refused to investigate, though their society friends generally acknowledge that White and Breese are guilty. But few of them care about the fate of lower-class women above the age of consent, which is 10. Mary, who’s worked for many famous people, meets Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell, who agree to help her with the manuscript thieves and the rape case. The failure of Mary’s daring plan leaves it to fate to exact revenge.
Famous figures of the period spice up a fine mystery that takes on a problem still making headlines.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-451-49846-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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