A quick-moving seaside mystery with a rich setting populated by characters readers won’t soon forget.
In Highet and Jones’ historical novel, a newly orphaned teenage girl is sent to live with her estranged aunt half a country away.
The year is 1929. Raised on a hardscrabble plot in Nebraska, 16-year-old Emily Cartwright is your typical farm girl—she can slaughter chickens, build a barn, you name it—until the untimely death of her mother, Constance, leaves her parentless. Without any other options, she is sent off to live with her estranged aunt, Isabel, on remote Martha’s Vineyard. The seaside New England setting is a shock to Emily’s system, as is her aunt’s house, which is also home to a small Irish family of servants, including the housekeeper’s daughter, Fiona—another teenage girl, and Emily’s first friend out East. Things at the Isabel Hewett home—known as “Hydrangea House”—are tense for several reasons, not the least of which is that Isabel had a daughter—also named Emily—who disappeared one day a few years prior while fishing. (Though some of her personal effects were later found, she has never been located.) The “First Emily,” as she is known, is not the only person to go missing at sea in this novel: Isabel’s close friend Ann Simpson has disappeared while out for a routine sail, and Isabel is convinced foul play is afoot. As Emily wonders how she will pass her days in her new home, Isabel recruits her to serve as something like a private detective on Ann’s case, which will thrust her into the depths of the Prohibition-era rum-running world. Highet and Jones’ setting is rich with both temporal and geographic details, and some of the best writing conveys Emily’s early, fish-out-of-water impressions of New England: “She was repelled by the angles and alleys, the denseness of the architecture disappearing into the sea mist and coming night. It was all just too strange and close together.” With a compelling “whodunit” aspect to the narrative and a protagonist both lovable and memorable, this work is a strong entry in the historical fiction genre.
A quick-moving seaside mystery with a rich setting populated by characters readers won’t soon forget.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798888247143
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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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