A gripping blend of dramatic fiction and historical portraiture.
In the second installment of a historical fiction series, a man finds himself perilously embroiled in the Texas Revolution.
In 1836, Texas settlers are in open revolt against the Mexican government, attempting to establish independence. Zebadiah Creed joins the cause, enlisting in the New Orleans Greys, still reeling from the murders of his parents by the Lakota and of his brother, Jonathan, by “bushwhackin’ thieves.” Zebadiah and his pal Grainger make their way to San Antonio, but their fort at the Alamo is in grave danger, soon to be overtaken by a sea of Mexican soldiers. Both men are tasked with a dangerous mission: delivering a letter to Gen. Sam Houston urgently requesting support. But the Alamo seems increasingly doomed, and Zebadiah and Granger are sent to solicit help from the impossibly arrogant Col. James Fannin, who refuses to comply with the request or to wisely retreat when an overwhelming army of Mexican soldados arrives. Jackson’s sequel to An Eye for an Eye (2017) combines a riveting, briskly paced tale of adventure with a historically nuanced peek at the conflict—the Texans see themselves as freedom fighters while the Mexican government considers the group invaders. The plot can become overly convoluted as well as implausible—at one juncture, Zebadiah seems to believe he can negotiate a peaceful cease-fire with a Mexican general by making him a gift of his Bowie knife, a proposition even he seems embarrassed by later. Still, Zebadiah is a captivatingly nuanced character, murderously angry but morally principled. And as Deaf Smith, another soldier, observes, it’s not at all obvious why he’s there at all: “Are ya here ’cause God wants you to be here? Son, in a fight like this, ya gotta serve somebody or some higher purpose, else your just killin’ for no good reason at all.”
A gripping blend of dramatic fiction and historical portraiture.Pub Date: April 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4328-6850-5
Page Count: 297
Publisher: Five Star Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.
Whitehead’s justly celebrated Harlem Trilogy comes to a triumphant, satisfying conclusion.
The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner has brought his decades-long saga of furniture retailer and part-time criminal fence Ray Carney into the 1980s, a time of starkly mixed blessings for a New York City galvanized by reckless real estate development, plagued with widespread homelessness, and immersed in crime and corruption of gaudy proportions. As with its two predecessors, Harlem Shuffle (2021) and Crook Manifesto (2023), this installment carves its historic period into three self-contained but interwoven stories set in three different years. The first takes place in 1981, when Ray, flush with pride over being named Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” is confounded when wife Elizabeth is denied a loan for her travel business. So, to get her the money she needs, he joins a crew led by the redoubtable Uncle Rich, a legendary thief, embarking on a near-impossible heist at the Waldorf Astoria. Elizabeth also spearheads the second installment, which takes place two years later, when she recruits the dyspeptic Pepper, Ray’s friend and sometime coconspirator, as bodyguard for a jittery art dealer carrying a valuable African mask. When that object goes missing, Pepper and a hip young woman bearing a mohawk haircut and combat boots wander the seedier streets of Manhattan to locate it, crossing paths with a “Melancholy Hitman” also frantically pursuing the mask and leaving mutilated corpses in his wake. In the final section, taking place in 1986, Ray struggles to fulfill a posthumous obligation to his ill-fated cousin, Freddie, by using all his hard-earned wiles as salesman and felon to save Freddie’s son, Robert, from being framed (or worse) in the murder of a bent Queens lawyer. It’s as improbable as packing three page-turning thrillers into one book that’s sustained throughout by rich, engaging characterizations and lucid, provocative reflections on a community, a city, and a people it presents as both exasperating and captivating with equal intensity.
A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550505
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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