Another stiff-upper-lip novel full of charm, romance, and a smidgen of mystery that’s altogether delightful.
Wedding preparations may be the death of a distant heir to the British throne in this 1930s period piece.
Lady Georgiana Rannoch (On Her Majesty’s Frightfully Secret Service, 2017, etc.) has relinquished her status as 35th in line to the throne to marry her love, Darcy O’Mara, an Irish Catholic with a hush-hush government job that carries him off at a moment’s notice. Poor as a church mouse, Georgie is staying with a friend in London while another friend makes her wedding gown. Her much-married actress mother will provide her trousseau, and the king and queen will attend the wedding. Georgie and Darcy can afford only a tiny flat in a sketchy area. Rescue comes in the form of a letter from Sir Hubert Anstruther, one of her mother’s exes and Georgie’s godfather, offering her the use of Eynsleigh, his beautiful home not far from London. Anstruther travels a good deal, and the house is so huge that he’ll need only a suite of rooms when he returns. Upon her arrival, Georgie finds that all the servants she remembers have been replaced and the house and grounds sadly neglected. Plunkett, the new butler, is obviously dismayed to see her, the so-called cook offers her tinned soup for dinner, the housemaid is rude, and the gardeners are selling most of the produce and pocketing the money. The first night Georgie spends at Eynsleigh, the gas tap is left on in her room, and only her habit of sleeping with the windows open saves her life. She discovers that Sir Hubert’s elderly and slightly mad mother is living in a closed-off wing of the house, all the valuable items have vanished, and the police are seeking a man who vanished after calling at the house. Delighted with the arrival of her mother, grandfather, and former maid, Queenie, who can actually cook, Georgie takes it upon herself to investigate, a decision that may put paid to her wedding plans.
Another stiff-upper-lip novel full of charm, romance, and a smidgen of mystery that’s altogether delightful.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-425-28352-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou. Loyal...
A gumbo seasoned with ghosts, love, and murder on the bayou.
When 30-something Declan Fitzgerald of Boston, a successful lawyer and a member of a large and loving family, breaks off his engagement to very suitable Jessica, he knows he needs to change his life. Lawyering is not fun anymore, so, recalling Manet Hall, an old deserted plantation house he once visited with law school classmate and New Orleans native Remy, he buys the property and moves down south. Declan is also a gifted craftsman, a born decorator, and very, very rich. Soon, he meets beautiful Lena, who’s visiting her grandmother Odette, Declan’s friendly Cajun neighbor. Declan is as certain that Lena is destined to be his wife as he was that Manet Hall would become his home. But, surprise, Lena has a troubled past (like the house) and is determined to resist Declan’s courtship. While he suits Lena and works on the place, Declan experiences troubling dreams. It seems he’s actually reliving the novel’s parallel story, which took place in 1899. In that year, the maid, Abbey Manet (from whom Lena, coincidentally, is descended, and who married wealthy Lucian Manet), was raped and murdered by her brother-in-law Julian as she nursed her baby daughter. Her body was dumped into the bayou by her mother-in-law, who despised her. And grief-stricken husband Lucian, away at the time, being told that Abbey had run off, committed suicide. Now, in an unconvincing twist of gender and reincarnation, it’s Declan who hears a baby crying , experiences childbirth and rape as the reincarnation of Abbey, while Lena is Lucian. The two accept all this with equanimity, and, Manet Hall’s secrets revealed, it becomes the setting for predictable and much foreshadowed resolutions.
Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou. Loyal fans will enjoy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14824-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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