The spree of period murders, capped by a welcome surprise, provides the perfect backdrop for debates about gender politics.
An unusually violent and methodical killer terrorizes 1866 London in McDonough’s debut.
D.I. Richard Tennant has just received evidence that Franz Meyer, a tailor hanged two years ago, may not have been the Railway Murderer after all, and he’s in no mood for another round of serial homicide. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the murder of Rev. Tobias Atwater, found dead and castrated inside a sewer pipe, kicks off. As if he and his sergeant, Jonathan Graves, hadn’t troubles enough, Dr. Andrew Lewis, the doctor he’d asked to examine the body, has been laid low by heart disease and has sent his granddaughter instead. Julia Lewis is a fully qualified physician, but she took her medical degree in far-off Philadelphia, and she’s a female who has no business climbing around filthy places examining corpses. Predictably, Julia turns out to be filled with a wide range of progressive attitudes that would make her right at home in the 21st century, and predictably, her sparring with Tennant gradually develops into something more complicated, even though Julia tells her aristocratic great-aunt that “marriage with him would not be a companionable union of equals.” But McDonough keeps the pace brisk as the body count rises, each corpse physically violated, each discovered with a balloon, amid a series of increasingly disturbing revelations about the calamitous effects of the cholera outbreak that began back in 1832 and has returned repeatedly with a vengeance—just like the malefactor whom cheeky Illustrated London News reporter Johnny Osborne prematurely dubs “the music-hall murderer.”
The spree of period murders, capped by a welcome surprise, provides the perfect backdrop for debates about gender politics.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781496746368
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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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