An intimate look at Hollywood’s dark secrets.
Glitz and gossip in the film world.
Lynch sets her entertaining debut novel in 1940s Hollywood, where aspiring actors are manipulated by studio executives and gossip columnists can make or break reputations with a keystroke. Edith “Edie” O’Dare, whose acting contract is nearing its end, becomes one of those reporters: After growing up poor in Boston, at 19 she won a trip to Hollywood and jumped at the chance to leave home. She was never catapulted to stardom, though; instead, she was cast in forgettable roles as “someone’s provocative best friend or madcap coworker.” Now, years later, she is looking for her next act. To earn a bit of extra money, she had long served as a source for Poppy St. John, the widely syndicated “Tinseltown Tattler.” But when Edie becomes the confidante of a young actress claiming to have been sexually assaulted by a popular star, she decides to branch out on her own. Not surprisingly, all of Hollywood circles the wagons around the star: “You go under contract, you say what they tell you to say,” Edie well knows. She needs to decide, in the actress's case and many others, what she is willing to disclose, whom she is willing to hurt or to help. In the Los Angeles Times, her column is christened “Do Tell.” Edie knows she’s not a corrective for the myths and legends that Hollywood creates about itself: “A large part of what I do is tell America what they want to hear,” she is convinced. And what America wants to hear—even as war rages in Europe—is salacious dirt. Although the plot lags when Lynch describes clothing, hairstyles, and makeup in too much detail, she doesn’t lose sight of a salient theme: Edie’s success depends on others’ vulnerability. Lynch’s characters—clad in designer gowns, inhabiting sumptuous mansions, and drinking champagne at lavish parties—are replaceable cogs in a powerful industry.
An intimate look at Hollywood’s dark secrets.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780385549370
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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