Parris’ fifth offers a credible depiction of period France, though sleuthing often takes a back seat to colorful subplots.
In 16th-century Paris, a defrocked Dominican–turned-spy gets entangled in court intrigue in the process of exposing a complex and deadly plot.
Notorious real-life figure Giordano Bruno, last seen in Treachery (2014), returns to France in 1585, hoping to ingratiate himself with the church and return to the Brotherhood. He playfully surprises his old friend Père Paul LeFèvre in the confessional to plead his case. But shortly afterward, Bruno discovers Paul facedown in the Seine, clinging to life, the victim of an attack. Paul’s dying word to his friend: “Circe.” Bruno’s arrival has clearly been noticed. King Henri, pilloried as an enemy of Catholicism and dubbed “King of Sodom” by his many enemies, brings Bruno to the palace. Blaming the Duke of Guise for the campaign against him, he asks Bruno to find the informants who are helping Guise. One of the likeliest is Frère Joseph de Chartres, who writes pamphlets for the Catholic League excoriating the king. Bruno finds a letter in Peter’s room describing explicit sexual acts. Could it have been planted by an enemy? Parris’ overstuffed plot vividly dramatizes the vibrantly vicious world of the court in rich historical detail: tangled allegiances, back-stabbing, secret romances, and bizarre customs. (Bruno attends a court party where the king is in drag.) Newcomers to the series may be frustrated by the numerous references to events from previous books. A second murder complicates Bruno’s task and raises the need for a solution. The discovery of a dance called The Masque of Circe signals a major break in the case.
Parris’ fifth offers a credible depiction of period France, though sleuthing often takes a back seat to colorful subplots.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-544-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
