While it isn’t deep, it’s smooth and suspenseful—and hard to stop reading once you’ve begun.
A breezy, atmospheric novel dripping with secrets.
When their beloved grandma Nan dies, sisters Kit and Claire O’Neill must empty out her house in suburban New York. In the attic (where else?), Kit discovers artifacts revealing their grandmother’s hidden life as a young movie star in Hollywood. Kit, now a cable news producer, and Claire were raised by Nan after their parents died. Stunned by what she’s uncovered, Kit vows to learn how Nebraska-bred Edith Stoppelmoor became Tinseltown’s Mercy Welles...and then left it all behind. The novel shifts back and forth in time, from Mercy’s exploits circa 1959 to Kit’s sleuthing in 2018 and beyond. An up-and-comer in Hollywood, Mercy already has an Oscar nomination when we meet her. But after she finds out her fiance is two-timing her, she decides to take some time off in Martha’s Vineyard, the fabled island off the coast of Massachusetts. There she meets Ren Sewards, an oyster fisherman estranged from his wealthy family. The two fall in love, and Mercy becomes involved in some serious island intrigue that may involve a killing or two. (A key scene takes place on Chappaquiddick, the tiny nearby island where Sen. Ted Kennedy famously drove his car off a bridge, triggering a major scandal.) Meanwhile, Kit is piecing together Mercy’s story and ultimately winds up on the Vineyard herself, where she meets an attractive young man who could be connected to the decades-old mysteries. Callahan does a nice job describing the Vineyard and its storied past. While his dialogue is stilted in places, and there are a couple of lapses in logic (would Ren really know that Humphrey Bogart line from Casablanca?), the tight plotting carries you along.
While it isn’t deep, it’s smooth and suspenseful—and hard to stop reading once you’ve begun.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780063282605
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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