A gripping, hard-to-put-down thriller.
Political upheaval in Egypt circa 1954 threatens the location shooting of The Ten Commandments—and the life of a young local hired as Cecil B. DeMille's personal assistant.
A film buff, Ali Hassan is initially thrilled to work for DeMille, whose swan song this biblical epic proves to be. But his enthusiasm is dimmed by the director's imperious and temperamental ways. And his safety is compromised by the violent aims of the Muslim Brotherhood extremist group, which targets newly installed Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser for his anti-theocratic ways and for cozying up to the blasphemous Hollywoodians. One of the group's outspoken members is Sherif, Ali's close but combative cousin, who pressures Ali into abetting a planned terrorist attack on the film set. After it becomes known that Ali, as DeMille's driver, ran over an influential imam to escape a demonstrating mob in Cairo, it's only a matter of time before he faces some very bad music. He ends up spending many years in prison, where he's beaten and tortured by an escaped Nazi welcomed into Egypt—supposedly "a new beacon of liberty"—for such purposes. The book is presented as Ali's firsthand account of his experiences, written years later for his radicalized American grandson, who sporadically emails his responses to it from jihadi training grounds unknown. These interruptions prove superficial in linking fundamentalism past and present and examining religious belief, but otherwise this departure by Blauner from his urban thrillers—including Sunrise Highway (2018) and Proving Ground (2017)—is great storytelling, a coming-of-age tale with a love story at its heart. The drama is leavened with wry accounts of the mercurial DeMille and his buff star, Charlton "Chuck" Heston. A Jewish documentary filmmaker thought to be an Israeli spy is straight out of classic noir. All in all, an inspired idea skillfully executed.
A gripping, hard-to-put-down thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2508-5101-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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