A powerful, humane novel that turns the headlines of recent years into a moving story of loss, courage, and hope.
Hayes’ novel explores themes of conscience, corruption, and the price of truth in a divided nation.
In 2017, Holly Bagley, a young Indiana police officer, is trying to reconcile duty, family, and conscience in an era of political upheaval. The narrative opens in the shadow of Donald Trump’s rise (“Bumptious Donald Trump, avatar of festering grievances, had taken the White House”) and moves swiftly into a world where private pain and public tension collide. When Holly partners with detective Garry Henderson, an older Black officer mourning the loss of his teenage son, the story expands into a broader exploration of race, grief, and moral responsibility in small-town America. Hayes’ prose is direct yet reflective, often capturing the quiet ache beneath the surface. Holly’s longing for her Marine boyfriend, Jimmy, who’s stationed in Afghanistan, mirrors the novel’s deeper themes of memory and disillusionment. The author renders Jimmy’s trauma with raw authenticity: “Body parts lying in the street like trash... It’s the stink, the stink…man.” Such scenes feel painfully intimate, illustrating how war and violence reverberate beyond the battlefield. Throughout, Hayes deftly balances a crime-driven plot with emotional realism. The partnership between Holly and Henderson evolves amid rising racial tensions and community fractures as both characters confront what it means to serve justice in a country where the concept of justice itself feels uncertain. Later, corruption seeps inward when Holly’s own father becomes entangled in a suspicious evidence case. “Bottom line,” she tells her superiors, “I wear the wire or I’m out of a job—is that your deal, Chief?” The moment captures the book’s essence: personal conviction colliding with institutional rot. Hayes’ prose blends procedural grit with emotional candor. He shows compassion even for the most flawed characters, acknowledging that “grief could be a dismal sojourn in hell if precipitated by an event you had no hand in creating.” Despite its density, the story remains propulsive, culminating in revelations that test faith, duty, and forgiveness.
A powerful, humane novel that turns the headlines of recent years into a moving story of loss, courage, and hope.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798822988347
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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