A clever, finely detailed historical mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the end.
Seifer’s saga shifts between Nazi Germany and the country’s problematic present-day repercussions as a man tries to piece together his past.
Rudy Styne, a reporter for Modern Times Magazine, has always been intrigued by his past, especially because he has a relative who could be his twin. But Rudy’s doppelgänger, Rolf Linzman, is 15 years older than him. This fact takes us to the story of the Maxwells, beginning in the run-up to World War II; there’s Elias—a Jew trying to pass as Christian—his son, Abe, and their servant family, the Linzmans, Gunter and his grandson, Gunter III, aka Guntie. Elias enjoys a successful career designing and building airplanes, but because everyone knows the Maxwells are Jews, they could lose everything. Eventually (and with crushing irony) the Nazi leadership puts the Linzmans in charge of the company, and the Maxwells must flee for their lives. Casting an ominous shadow over these proceedings is the notorious figure of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, head of the Luftwaffe, and a flamboyant, larger-than-life character whose dress uniform had “so many colorful badges that it looked like a concession stand.” Another standout character, besides Abe himself, is his daughter, Rose, a piano prodigy who, at age 6, manages to offend the narcissistic Hitler at a concert. And then, in a loosely connected present-day subplot, there are evil genius computer hackers with names like NTroodr, T-Dan Mulrooney, and Code Breaker Morant. Sorting out the almost doppelgänger likeness between Rudy and Rolf eventually asserts itself as a major plot thread, and it is indeed a clever device. And the book also serves as a detailed historical summary of Hitler’s strategies during World War II. In an endnote, Seifer separates his fictional characters—Rudy, the Maxwells, the Linzmans, for instance—from the many well-known historical ones he includes. In the narrative itself, however, the author blends fact and fiction almost seamlessly. The subplot with the competing hackers is a tad overwhelming, and many readers will find it hard to understand their machinations. But Seifer is clearly having fun juggling so many characters, time periods, and themes, and his creative energy is infectious.
A clever, finely detailed historical mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the end.Pub Date: April 11, 2019
ISBN: 9781093545777
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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