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
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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