A thought-provoking noir with a searing period flavor.
A compassionate caregiver risks all to solve a brutal crime.
Hirahara’s beautifully crafted novel opens with a poem that poignantly describes the loss and devastation inflicted on Japanese Americans forced into internment camps. In 1946, two years after she was released from Manzanar, Aki Ito works as a nurse’s aide in the newly reopened Japanese Hospital in East Los Angeles, her home before the war. Noticing signs of abuse on newly admitted patient Haruki Watanabe, she asks to speak to the son who brought him to the hospital. This, surprisingly, turns out to be Shinji, aka Babe, the best friend of Aki’s husband, Art, and the best man at their wedding in Chicago a year and a half earlier. Babe served in the Army with Art, who’s days away from discharge himself. Flashbacks filled with family and friends describe the couple’s efforts to rebuild a life after detention and move the story from Aki’s stint in Chicago to her current life in LA. When Mr. Watanabe is shot, Aki tries to contact Babe, but he’s no longer at the hotel where he and his father had been living. A sense of duty and her affection for the avuncular Watanabe compel her to dig deeper, and Art’s homecoming provides further impetus and support. Hirahara expertly folds this crime story into her insightful and fully realized portrait of postwar America and the struggles of Japanese Americans to come to terms with the American society that had imprisoned them during the war. Aki and Art’s sleuthing takes them all over the city, most significantly through the criminal underworld, on the way to a complex solution. The mystery adds urgency to this historical snapshot but never overpowers it.
A thought-provoking noir with a searing period flavor.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781641293594
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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