A gripping and unsettling gothic novel steeped in Welsh history and folklore.
Dismissed from the London hospital where he works, a young doctor reluctantly accepts a position as a private physician at the isolated and unwelcoming Welsh estate of Plas Helyg during the summer of 1783.
When Henry Talbot first arrives at Lord Julian Tresilian’s estate with little more than his doctor’s bag and the clothes on his back, both the residents of Plas Helyg and Penhelyg, the neighboring mining village, are less than agreeable and, in some instances, downright aggressive toward him. While this behavior could easily be written off as cultural animosity between the Welsh and the English, Henry can’t help but feel that there’s something else amiss. With the gatehouse where he was meant to stay falling into irreparable shambles, the lady of the house struggling to maintain a tenuous grip on reality, and signs pointing toward his predecessor’s death having been the result of foul play, Henry turns to Linette Tresilian, Julian’s niece, for help. Linette quickly proves herself to be self-sufficient, stubborn, and thoroughly unconventional for an 18th-century woman. She prefers men’s clothing, has little interest in marriage, keeps the books for the Plas Helyg estate, and spends much of her time looking after the men who toil in Julian’s mines. At first unsure of what to make of one another, Henry and Linette quickly join forces to uncover the dark and dangerous truth that so many of Plas Helyg’s residents have kept secret. Stokes-Chapman has crafted an engaging work of historical fiction that is a love letter to Welsh culture as well as a gripping and atmospheric mystery pitting scientific reason against the supernatural.
A gripping and unsettling gothic novel steeped in Welsh history and folklore.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780063392427
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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