Peppered with quaintly dated quotations about the roles of women in the 14th century and related facts, Bayard’s mystery...
A court scribe seeks to clear the name of a friend while working within the confines dictated by her station and sex in 1393 Paris.
Growing up friendly with the future King Charles, Christine de Pizan (in real life the author of The Book of the City of Ladies) never imagined being employed in service of the palace. But when her husband dies and leaves her with mouths to feed, she’s grateful for her work as a scribe. Because the king hasn’t seemed like himself lately, making capricious attacks on those around him, Christine’s mother, Francesca, urges her daughter to keep her head down. That’s not easy for Christine, who has a sharp tongue and a lot of opinions for a woman, qualities that draw her to the musical and similarly candid Alix de Clairy, the wife of one of the king’s closest confidants, Hughues de Précy. Despite Francesca’s admonitions, Christine doesn’t confine her daily conversations to the elite; she speaks to the prostitutes of Paris about the gossip of the day. This habit turns out to be helpful when unusual events happen on the palace grounds: a murder, a missing magical book, and the apparent possession and hunting of those close to the king. Even worse, Alix is accused of the murder of her husband and is locked in the Châtelet as she awaits the inevitable guilty verdict. Through Marion, a sex worker in her neighborhood, Christine learns that Alix has been framed, but both Christine and Marion know that no one will take her word about what truly happened. Bent on justice, Christine does what investigating she can along with her monastic friend, Michel. The two both work their palace connections and contacts to follow the complex web of secrets, though it seems unlikely that the truth will be uncovered before Alix is burned for her alleged crimes.
Peppered with quaintly dated quotations about the roles of women in the 14th century and related facts, Bayard’s mystery debut is slow to get underway but ramps up to a satisfying ending.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8788-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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