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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!
“What can a miserable man and a miserable woman do for each other?” Li illustrates how two Romantic era musicians navigated such a relationship.
An unusually placed coda serves as a prelude, not a conclusion, to Li’s recreation of the tumultuous lives of musicians Adelaide Percheron and John Field. Adelaide, an Indian-born orphan of mixed racial heritage, has just learned of the death of her estranged husband, John—credited with the development of the nocturne as a musical form—after years of living separately and pursuing their individual artistic passions. Following that intriguing introduction is an insightful account of the indirect paths each took to survive challenging early years and to advance in the world of music. John was born in Dublin in 1782 into a family of Irish musicians who invested heavily in his musical training, hoping to produce “the next Mozart” despite the talented boy’s sensitive and dreamy nature. The precocious and preternaturally self-possessed Adelaide learns the rudiments of the pianoforte from a governess and strategic life lessons from her grandmother. Eventually, she sets out from Pondicherry for the broader opportunities she believes await her in her father’s native France. Against a background of social upheaval across Europe due to revolutions and Napoleon’s rising power, the two grow and mature in musicality and pursue the lives they’ve imagined for themselves. John and Adelaide have just met, in 1807 Moscow, as this volume ends, leaving the door open for Li to explore their relationship in future installments. Peppered with interludes and glances into the future, Li’s novel explores both the modern commodification of music and the value of art as a means of ensuring immortality, a hedge against the “night” that falls when a life ends. Her keen psychological study of the musicians and their muses delivers the themes elegantly.
A virtuoso performance from Li. Brava!Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374613051
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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