An engrossing, atmospheric crime thriller set in East Germany.
An American expatriate in East Germany attempts to locate a missing woman in this debut novel.
East Germany, 1987. American-born Adam Hedman has spent the last 10 years in the Communist country, seven of them in prison for breaking a police officer’s jaw. Now he works at a factory in the town of Angermünde, where his Sisyphean task is to shovel unending lorries of coal into a massive furnace. But the day has finally arrived for Adam to fulfill his real purpose: murdering the man who killed his wife. It’s taken years to track him down, and he’ll only be in the area for a night. Adam is so dead-set on completing the job that he won’t even be distracted by the disappearance of Anna Sievers, a local woman who is the sister of Adam’s co-worker Evelyn. Unfortunately, a chance encounter with a skittish teenage hunter in the woods blows a literal hole in Adam’s plan. He wakes up two days later in the house of a Stasi officer—the father of the boy who shot him—recovering from a bullet wound, his target long gone. To make matters worse, Adam’s criminal history makes him a prime suspect in the case of Evelyn’s missing sister. At a police station, Adam “didn’t really know what the file would say himself. But he knew that his stretch in prison would always make him a suspect. No matter in what regard. If someone had stolen a piece of chewing gum in Angermünde, he would have been the first one to be arrested. Even more so regarding the disappearance of a young woman.” Can Adam clear his name without ruining his chances of finally exacting revenge on the man he hates the most? To do so, he’ll have to help Evelyn locate Anna, and it’s a journey that will take him deeper behind the Iron Curtain than he ever could have imagined.
Beuy’s prose is clipped and muscular, befitting both Adam and his chilly environment: “Shoveling coal was as arduous as any other day. The cold did not make it easier or harder. Even the onset of the snow-bringing east wind did nothing to change that. Neither did the prospect of Evelyn’s search drive soon dying out or the adrenaline-fueled trip to the Soviet barracks.” Adam is a man of secrets, and he keeps them from the audience just as readily as he does from everyone else. This makes for a neat puzzle as readers attempt to suss out the particulars of Adam’s motivations and backstory in addition to the disappearance of Anna. The crime is engaging, and there are the expected appearances of the Stasi and the KGB. But the series opener’s most appealing feature is the author’s convincing depiction of East German culture in the ’80s. The enamel factory where Adam is employed is a collective endeavor, more like a commune than a typical 9-to-5 job, and the brooding loner makes for an appealingly ill-suited cog in the cheery socialist machine around him. It will be fun to see how Beuy develops Adam’s world in future volumes.
An engrossing, atmospheric crime thriller set in East Germany.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Kawoom Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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