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
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
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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