Maggie’s second adventure (Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, 2012) is a romantic thriller detailing the life of the royals during...
A mathematician born in Britain and raised in America adds spying to her resume.
Maggie Hope has left her job as a secretary to Winston Churchill to enter MI5’s school for spies. Although her grades are stellar, she doesn’t do well enough on the physical tests to be sent to France. Instead, MI5 finds a job for her as maths tutor to the Princess Elizabeth so that she can keep an eye on Elizabeth, fondly known as Lilibet, who, as heir to the throne, may be a Nazi target. Maggie arrives at Windsor Castle with a lot on her mind. Her boyfriend has been shot down over Germany, and the father she had long thought dead is working at Bletchley Park—and may be a German spy. Maggie soon becomes a favorite of Lilibet and her younger sister, Margaret, if not their beloved Corgis, and bonds with the large and varied castle staff, both upstairs and downstairs, despite their understandable fears following the recent murder of a friend of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. As she pokes around, Maggie begins to suspect one of the snobbish ladies of Nazi leanings. Taken under the wing of Lord Gregory Strathcliffe, a badly disfigured RAF pilot, Maggie soon discovers several disquieting things after someone else is killed on the castle grounds. It’s good that Maggie is willing to risk her life to protect Lilibet, but will things indeed come to such a pass?
Maggie’s second adventure (Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, 2012) is a romantic thriller detailing the life of the royals during the perilous times of World War II.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-553-59362-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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