An engaging and entertaining alternate take on a mammoth literary figure’s fate.
Squire imagines the murder of Charles Dickens in this historical novel.
The novel opens with Charles Dickens suffering a stroke while in the middle of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood and dying in Kent, England. That’s all largely accepted as truth, but in this inventive and intriguing piece of historical fiction, the great British author is murdered, the victim of strychnine poisoning. When Dickens’ notes for Drood are stolen, retired bookkeeper and distant Dickens relative Dunston Burnett becomes convinced the two events are related. He begins an investigation that encompasses Dickens’ literary rivals, family, and others. During this investigation, running parallel to Scotland Yard Chief of Detectives Archibald Line’s inquiries, family secrets are uncovered, more murders are committed, and Burnett uses his relative’s unfinished Drood to lead him to pertinent information. All the while, Dickens’ beloved sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, tries to protect his reputation from potential tawdriness as the world mourns his loss. A sweet secondary story, which eventually intertwines with the primary plot, depicts Georgina’s stableboy, Isaac, and parlor maid, Dulcet, falling in love. At the end of the novel, Burnett and Line are allies, so the reader may expect more exploits from the duo (“He didn’t know what the future held in store for him. Perhaps the tranquillity and solitude of a contented bachelorhood; perhaps another adventure in tandem with the iconic Archibald Line”). The novel is a delightful piece of reimagined history set against a backdrop of locations and characters that would make Dickens proud. It’s hard to tell where the history ends and the fiction begins in this twisty narrative (though the author includes a handy fact vs. fiction guide at the end of the book). References to many of Dickens’ works—including Oliver Twist, Bleak House, David Copperfield, and A Christmas Carol—and real figures from his life, such as Hogarth, his ex-wife, Catherine, and his girlfriend Ellen Ternan, are interspersed with fictional characters and storylines. All of it combines in an intriguing mystery, one worthy of one of the greatest writers in literary history.
An engaging and entertaining alternate take on a mammoth literary figure’s fate.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781685123581
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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