Often funny, always light, this one will appeal to mystery buffs who don’t require sex and gore—and to those harboring fond...
A tightly plotted debut mystery that mixes foul play, wordplay, and humor.
The jokes start right away. Jonathan Tucker wakes up with “her” in his bed, but “she” is his faithful dog, Nip. Together, they are Nip and Tuck. He's a widower who in his grief walked away from his former Manhattan law firm, Winston Barr & Trombley. Now senior partner Evan Trombley wants him back because Ben Baum is dead of an apparent heart attack. Baum had headed Ozone Industries, the law firm’s biggest client, and he left behind a strange precatory letter containing Tolkien-style runes and a prediction of his “murder most foul” committed by an unspecified person close to him. Baum’s letter leaves behind a set of puzzles, all relating to his favorite books. He loved classics such as The Hobbit, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and that contributes to the novel’s light tone. Tuck’s consulting assignment is to “discreetly ferret out” information to help the firm decide how to proceed with Baum’s will. Tuck’s pay is $200,000 per month for up to three months, an amount that doesn’t appear to surprise him in the least. He attends Baum’s funeral in London at the request of Baum’s daughter, Dorothy. The decedent turns out to have been “a bit of an aging hippie” who had argued with what a colleague called his “gypsy whore” on the day of his death. The author’s fun shows through with Tuck’s constant indulgence inventing new collective nouns: “a joint of osteopaths, a rash of dermatologists, a stream of urologists, a balance of accountants.” Many of the characters’ names come from children’s literature: Dorothy, Charlotte, and Baum, to name a few.
Often funny, always light, this one will appeal to mystery buffs who don’t require sex and gore—and to those harboring fond memories of reading J.R.R. Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, and Lewis Carroll.Pub Date: June 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-442-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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