A crisp and clever whodunit with a juicy gallery of suspects.
Who murdered the philandering choirmaster?
Five days before the scheduled 1914 Hampstead Voices’ Christmas Concert, Lady Emma Fonthill and tenor Paul Seddon find Emma's husband, Sir Aidan, sitting dead at his piano, a tuning fork sticking out of his head. A flashback to two days earlier launches a series of sections structured as musical movements. Once the concert is sold out, Aidan feels emboldened to ask the music society’s dour young treasurer, Cavendish, to write him two blank checks for some “small expenses.” Later, during a visit to his young daughter, Daphne, Aidan places inappropriate hands on her teacher, Hattie Greene. Emma, who’s well aware of her husband’s “peccadillos,” spies on him regularly. Paul meanwhile confronts his sister, Anna, over the affair with Aidan that left her with a child. Composer Roderick Masters is furious that Aidan’s pronounced one of his Christmas pieces rubbish. Ursula Cavendish’s affair with Aidan enrages her husband, Charles. And then there’s colorful blackmailer Tiggie Benson. Aidan’s surprising changes of singing assignments and failure to pay his performers come to a head at the Voices' final rehearsal, making him a nervous wreck and leading to his murder. And what of the music box anonymously delivered to Aidan? DCI Silas Quinn must deal with the breakdown of his heretofore faithful Sgt. Inchball before proceeding to the crime at hand. The case seems straightforward, requiring only a methodical questioning of witnesses. But the murder of one of his men makes the case personal for Quinn.
A crisp and clever whodunit with a juicy gallery of suspects.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8955-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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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