Tautly gripping, with vividly malevolent characters and some excellent historical color.
A Civil War whodunit by former US congressman and second-novelist Mrazek (Stonewall’s Gold, 1999) describes a combat veteran’s 1863 quest for a prostitute’s murderer.
John “Kit” McKittredge is a Harvard senior when the Civil War breaks out, and he enlists with patriotic fervor. Commissioned as a lieutenant, Kit sees action early, leading a platoon at Ball’s Bluff. Wounded in the stomach, Kit is soused with laudanum by doctors who (lacking antibiotics) fully expect him to die within days. Incredibly, he survives, though not without gaining a solid addiction. In recognition of his valor, the army offers him a noncombatant post, assigning him to the Provost Marshall’s office, responsible for investigating crimes and corruption. There’s plenty of both, for the unprecedented war budget has brought every species of swindler, embezzler, and common thief to Washington, D.C., along with more whores than Baptists and a government staffed by cutthroat opportunists who could make Machiavelli blush. On his first assignment, investigating war profiteers who supplied defective artillery to the army, Kit is bluntly warned (first by a mysterious stranger, then by a congressman) not to dig too deep if he knows what’s good for him. Undeterred, he presses on but is soon diverted by the murder of an unknown woman last seen publicly at the birthday party of the notoriously debauched General Hooker (his name already synonymous with prostitution). As Kit looks into case, he finds that the victim (a prostitute named Anya Hagel) had a number of unsettling connections to some very prominent members of the government. He also finds that General Hooker has taken an interest in Kit’s career, inviting him to join his staff and introducing him to prominent military and political figures. If this is the carrot, what is the stick? Well, there’s the inconvenient matter of Kit’s opium addiction—and his bad luck in falling in love with Amelie, a prostitute who used to work with Anya.
Tautly gripping, with vividly malevolent characters and some excellent historical color.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30673-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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
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