by Sarah Rayne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2021
A chocolate box of classical music, banter, historic tidbits, and spooky stories.
The Nick and Nora of music research probe the mystery of the vanished Chopin Library and its deadly legacy.
Elderly professor Ernest Liripine and Dr. Theo Purslove are excited to receive an old scrapbook sent by Dr. Liripine’s former student Nina Randall, who’s currently working in Warsaw. The book provides links to the storied Chopin Library, which was presumably destroyed by the Nazis, and to a subgenre of music euphemistically called “Dark Cadence”—that is, execution music. Is this just one of the eerie myths surrounding the Library? They decide to consult music researcher Phineas Fox and Arabella Tallis, his ladylove and sidekick. Flashbacks take the story intermittently back to 1918 as two young women named Katya and Zena hide in a large, elaborate home. Rayne attenuates the suspense with a slow reveal of their location and their plight. They’re in imperial Russia, connected to Czar Nicholas and his family. As Phin and Arabella decipher more documents, Lucek Socha, who heads the archive office in Warsaw, contemplates a romance with Nina and recalls his unsettling upbringing by his artistic aunt Helena. These eerie reminiscences are developed along with the other narrative threads to produce a mosaic of the rise and fall of the Library during World War II. Despite the strenuous attempts to bring all the parts together, the novel reads more like an anthology. Still, Rayne writes with panache and imagination, especially about relationships. Phin and Arabella have luscious chemistry, and the elderly academics bicker with courtly drollery.
A chocolate box of classical music, banter, historic tidbits, and spooky stories.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8988-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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