An engrossing blend of mystery and high drama, embellished by many historical elements.
An intricate historical novel based on a murder committed in Atlanta in the 1800s.
In late August, just weeks before the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, Baker Bass, a well-respected merchant, starts his morning walk to work down Ellis Street. He’s carrying a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson for protection. He had moved his family to Atlanta a few years prior and opened a dry goods and tobacco store. Thinking about the detectives who had accused him of selling stolen tobacco, he’s taken by surprise by a man who sidles up to him and shoots him in the head. The police are baffled by the case. The only clues are a missing gun, which was stolen from the coroner’s house prior to the murder, and rumors about a tobacco deal that may have gone wrong. The characters driving the story are Det. Thomas Greenberry Conn, aka “Green Conn,” a crooked cop who paid potential witnesses to testify that they saw Bass shoot himself; Jenkins, a traveling tobacco salesman; and Capt. Manly, second in command of the Atlanta Police Department—and the man assigned the task of solving the murder. Bass’ murder sets the stage for an intricate whodunit with layered portrayals of Baker’s family, friends, enemies, and associates. Cobb also threads the social and political details of 19th-century America into the novel, mentioning, for example, a talk given by Booker T. Washington. While the dialogue is somewhat plain, Cobb creates mesmerizing scenes. One knock-down, drag-out fight evokes the language and cadence of old radio mysteries: “Every sensation was intensified––the throbbing of his heart...labored breathing...the feel of his fingers wrapped around the gun barrel.”
An engrossing blend of mystery and high drama, embellished by many historical elements.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9780578339887
Page Count: 424
Publisher: M G Cobb Books
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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