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THE COLLABORATORS

Hill takes time out from his notable series featuring detectives Dalziel and Pascoe for a longish (448 pp.) tale—first published in Britain in 1987, and very much in the mode of his WW I chronicle No Man's Land—of moral and political compromise, despair, and unexpected love in occupied France. The densely plotted story centers on Gunter Mai, a sympathetic lieutenant in the occupying German army who is obliged to canvass Paris for possible collaborators, and on Janine Simonian, a young woman who is obliged to enlist officially as an informant to the Abwehr in exchange for news about her wounded husband Jean-Paul. When JeanPaul returns to his family, partly amnesiac and transfixed by hatred of the Germans, Janine, drawing away from him, becomes gradually more dependent on Mai; and when her mother-in-law and two children are rounded up in a pogrom, she offers herself to Mai again. Even though she has no secrets to betray and he does not want to use her, they make a second bargain, preventing the children (though not their grandmother) from being shipped to Auschwitz. In the meantime, Jean-Paul has become one of the most flamboyant members of the Resistance; and when Janine and Mai make a third bargain (the children have been seized again, this time in Toulouse), her bogus information coincides with a tip having fatal consequences for Jean-Paul and his colleagues. Hill's account of Janine's collaboration is grimly ironic: she never intentionally gives Mai any information; he is unable to restore any of her loved ones and after the liberation reverses political sympathies; she is branded her husband's betrayer by the very citizens who had been collaborating more fully themselves. A moving, richly textured account of an inhuman military occupation and the all-too-human loyalties it spawns. In Hill's view of war, there can only be losers.

Pub Date: July 14, 1989

ISBN: 0586204539

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Countryman

Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989

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MAGIC HOUR

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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