The most compelling mystery here lurks between the lines.
An Englishwoman running from her past finds herself out of her depth on a 1939 ocean voyage from England to Australia.
The opening tableau of Rhys’ novel flashes forward to its close: an elegant woman, handcuffed, clad in a green dress with matching hat and pumps and one of those fox stoles with a head, is escorted off a ship by police. Her identity and crime remain undisclosed until the end. Lily Shepherd, Rhys’ protagonist and sole narrator, is a former housemaid whose affair with the master’s son has driven her to enlist in a government program that recruits young women for domestic service in Australia. Upon embarking from Essex on the ocean liner Orontes, Lily is plunged into an ethnically and socially striated floating universe, competently evoked by Rhys. Sailing in tourist class, Lily has assigned dinner companions who include Edward Fletcher, newly recovered from tuberculosis, who is traveling to Australia for his heath, and his older sister, Helena. A less welcome fellow diner is George Price, a blustering bigot. Lily is immediately attracted to curly-haired, handsome Edward. She finds a confidante in Maria Katz, a Jewish woman who fled Nazi-annexed Austria and is anguished over the unknown fate of her parents, who stayed behind. First-class passengers Eliza and Max Campbell, charismatic aristocrats, often dragoon Lily and Edward into onboard and shoreside escapades involving copious alcohol consumption. But why are Eliza and Max slumming with the bourgeoisie in second class? On one such excursion, to the pyramids, Edward and Lily kiss, but for the ensuing weeks at sea he waxes alternately warm and distant. Lily is nonplussed, but her bafflement is required to guard the novel's main wellspring of suspense, which has little to do with the identities of the murderess or victim. The very naming of this issue would constitute a spoiler, which is a shame: dealing with it head-on would have made for a more complex and less coy narrative.
The most compelling mystery here lurks between the lines.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6272-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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