A pleasant, escapist diversion.
In this third series installment, a newly engaged couple from 1930s Chicago visits blue-blooded relations in England.
Now that they’ve been fully welcomed into upper-class life, Henrietta Von Harmon and Clive Howard have a multitude of duties to attend to. First, of course, there’s their upcoming wedding—a lavish affair that will host their families, friends, and all of Clive’s parents’ upper-crust set. This is complicated by Henrietta’s grandfather Oldrich Exley, a man who has grand plans for his daughter Martha (Henrietta’s mother) and her brood. He also insists on walking Henrietta down the aisle at her wedding even though she’s promised her dear friend Mr. Hennessey that honor. Henrietta and Clive must figure out when to follow their hearts and when to give in to their class-conscious elders’ expectations. Meanwhile, Henrietta’s sister, Elsie, quickly becomes entangled with two men: steadfast but uninspiring (and oddly unsolicitous) Stan and the dashing Lt. Harrison Barnes-Smith, a man who’s shown interest in her but has a reputation as a scoundrel. After their wedding, the Howards head to England, where Clive’s uncle and aunt hold court at a crumbling but grand manse, Castle Linley. There, between dinner parties with aristocrats, they get wrapped up in another sordid case when a man is found robbed and murdered outside a pub, and the main culprit is Clive’s brooding cousin Wallace. Cox’s (A Ring of Truth, 2017, etc.) latest novel suffers from odd pacing, like its predecessor; the beginning drags, recapping the events between the last book and this one for many pages before any present action happens. The ending, by contrast, accelerates startlingly quickly, setting the stage for another series entry. However, Cox’s eye for historical detail remains sharp, and England through the Americans’ eyes is delightful, especially when relating the feeling of a country subdued after World War I: “Henrietta had observed that everything in England had an air of tradition and heavy formality to it, a quiet mutedness that pervaded all, like a painting so old that some of the color had leached out or faded.…Highbury, by comparison, was much more…dazzling. Brighter somehow.”
A pleasant, escapist diversion.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-373-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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