Hair-raising descriptions of life in the Middle Ages enhance a challenging puzzle.
In 1382 London, multiple murders surrounding a theft from the king’s treasury provide a dangerous puzzle for a coroner and a monk to solve.
Brother Athelstan, parish priest of St. Erconwald, and Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, have partnered to solve many a murky mystery, but few have been as troublesome as the theft of the money meant to pay a royal debt to Italian bankers and the murders surrounding it. Exchequer of Coin Henry Beaumont, who’s tasked with removing funds from the impregnable Flambard’s Tower, arrives there to find all his underlings dead and the treasure gone. When Master Thibault, Keeper of the King’s Secrets, calls upon the sleuthing pair to discover how the murders were committed and the coin stolen, they proceed to examine the tower and the bodies. They also look into the murders of the hangmen of London in search of possible connections. Athelstan finds more and more people dead, even one in his own parish church. The Italian bankers, who are naturally suspect, blame the Carbonari, a society of thieves, but after examining every avenue, Athelstan is sure this must have been an inside job. The little monk travels the squalid, dangerous streets looking for clues and finds the answer even more horrifying than he could imagine.
Hair-raising descriptions of life in the Middle Ages enhance a challenging puzzle.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78029-139-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
The lives of vividly drawn characters illuminate a lesser-known part of 20th-century history.
This engrossing historical novel focuses on the lives of three Black Americans in the aftermath of World War II.
In 1948, Ozzie Philips is a newly enlisted young soldier from Philadelphia who arrives at his station in occupied Germany just in time for the order by President Harry Truman desegregating the U.S. military. It’s inspiring news, but Ozzie will find it’s a rough transition. In 1950, Ethel Gathers is a journalist and the wife of a U.S. Army officer posted to Mannheim in occupied Germany. Unhappily childless, one day she sees a group of young biracial children tended by nuns and ends up volunteering at their orphanage. When Ethel discovers thousands of these children, born as the result of relationships between American soldiers and German women, she’s fired with purpose. In 1965 in Maryland, Sophia Clark is the ambitious teenage daughter of a hardworking farm family. When she’s unexpectedly selected for a scholarship to a fancy boarding school, she’s eager for the opportunity, if unprepared for what she’ll face as one of the first Black students to attend. The novel traces each character’s life in separate chapters, eventually revealing the connections among them. Their stories are firmly grounded in meticulous research, from the current events of each period down to details of clothing styles. Ozzie copes with the infuriating indignities imposed on “colored” soldiers despite their essential contributions, and Ethel and Sophia each learn to navigate arcane hierarchies—for Ethel, the scorekeeping of military wives and the barriers of bureaucracy, and for Sophia, the perils of boarding school. Their individual experiences are all part of the larger historical force of World War II and its influence on the Civil Rights Movement. At some points the dialogue can be stilted in its efforts to convey history, but the characters and rich details are warmly engaging.
The lives of vividly drawn characters illuminate a lesser-known part of 20th-century history.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781668069912
Page Count: 464
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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