A fast-paced espionage thriller that’s undermined by a lack of freshness.
A clandestine alliance, dedicated to preserving Christianity from communism and fascism, undertakes a dangerous covert mission in Stalin’s Russia in Keating’s historical thriller.
In 1928, shortly before Moscow’s St. Michael’s Lutheran Church is to be demolished by Soviet authorities, Pastor Gabriel Fischer finds a remarkable religious relic: the first translation of the Bible into Russian, accomplished by theologian Johann Ernst Glück. He quickly transports the work to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where it is to be hidden, and then he’s summarily executed in a planned hitalong with his friend Eckhart Konig. Meanwhile, a priest and a Lutheran pastor—Patrick O’Riley and Eric Meyer—intervene heroically during an assassination attempt on another man of the cloth, John Rose, during a symposium at Georgetown University. The assassins turn out to be agents sent by Stalin. O’Riley and Meyer’s exploits impress the Alliance of Saint Michael, a secretive organization, both for their quick action in the face of danger and for their profound appreciation of the threat communism and fascism pose to Christian civilization. The pair accept an invitation to join the group and are tasked with recovering Glück’s Bible before the cathedral is destroyed. Keating’s book is vigorously paced overall; there’s no deficit of action or intrigue in these pages. However, the book as a whole feels rather stale, and readers likely won’t be able to escape the sense that they have read a book very much like this one before. The secret society at the heart of the novel, in particular, is formulaic stuff that readers of the cloak-and-dagger genre will certainly be familiar with. Moreover, the prose is similarly unspectacular—clumsy and earnest, with a tendency toward melodrama: “The communists had made clear that religion and the Church were enemies of the State, and destined for annihilation.”
A fast-paced espionage thriller that’s undermined by a lack of freshness.Pub Date: May 5, 2022
ISBN: 979-8818739762
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 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 sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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