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A Nude of Some Importance

The author weaves the narrative thread between serious and funny ably and offers a compelling 19th-century mystery plot as...

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A sequel delivers a flight through American history and a detective story full of jokes and red herrings.

Giesser’s (A Cheese of Some Importance, 2015) tale is alternately narrated by Cassius Lightner, a clerk at the U.S. Patent Office, and his fiancee, Amanda Crofton, a British expatriate. It’s the summer of 1816, and months after the conclusion of the last mystery the two solved—that of a missing ceremonial cheese—the couple are unwittingly drawn into another whodunit while at a Baltimore museum exhibition of the titular nude. Rembrandt Peale, a rich artist who also happens to have the contract to light Baltimore with gaslight technology, presents the show, at which there is a suspicious gas-leak explosion. Lightner is deputized by his boss, Dr. Thornton (a family friend of the Peales), to investigate the cause of the blast. Lightner and Crofton are joined in their sleuthing by former sailor Charlie Dunn, a free person of color working at the patent office. At one point, Lightner observes about Dunn: “He could cross the color line by altering his manner. A lot of people who met him weren’t quite sure whether he was black or not, and Charlie’s speech generally tipped the calculation one way or another. Why he chose to play which race, and with whom, I couldn’t always fathom.” Lightner, Crofton, and Dunn are drawn deeper and deeper into the web surrounding the explosion, and the case takes on international proportions—French, Russian, and English agents all enter the probe’s orbit. The novel ends somewhat abruptly, though not unsatisfactorily, with the loose ends tied up but not totally resolved, perhaps setting up for another sequel. The camaraderie between Lightner, Dunn, and Crofton shines through their dialogue, and their conversations allow the author to hit his comedic stride. Not every joke throughout lands, but the story quickly moves on to the next one, making for a zippy read. Most impressively, Giesser inserts intelligent observations about race and early American industrialism alongside his jokes; one such trenchant moment sees Dunn playing with the performative aspect of race to aid in his detective work.

The author weaves the narrative thread between serious and funny ably and offers a compelling 19th-century mystery plot as well.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2016

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 241

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2016

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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