A delightfully informative combination of racing lore and a clever con.
A society lady’s past as a con artist helps right a wrong involving racehorses and grifting.
Gideon Bates may be an attorney from a society family, but his wife, Elizabeth, comes from a family of grifters. She hasn’t put her past entirely behind her but only uses her talents to help people. When racehorse owner Sebastian Nolan hires Gideon to help him arrange a dowry for his 23-year-old daughter, Irene, in order to help her find a suitable husband, he invites Gideon and his family to watch the Belmont Stakes from his box. Irene, the driving force behind Nolan's stable, is devastated when jockey Cal Regan, whom she loves, is first the victim of a dirty racetrack trick and then is badly injured when Irene’s favorite horse, Trench, collapses during his race. Meanwhile, the Bates family hears the story of how Daniel Livingston, another horse owner, was once engaged to Irene’s long-dead mother, Mary, who left him for Nolan, creating a lifelong feud between the two. Both men are gobsmacked when they see a woman at the track who looks just like their lost love accompanied by Elizabeth’s father, a grifter known as the Old Man. Though Irene is pregnant, she hasn’t told Cal, who’s too proud to marry her without money. So the kindhearted Elizabeth, her father, and Mary Nolan's look-alike cook up a con that will solve the young couple's problems. Posing as a wealthy Spanish widow who’ll claim a fortune as soon as a family dispute is solved, the look-alike borrows money from quite a few wealthy men. Elizabeth plans on giving her share of the proceeds to Irene. The things she learns about the past make her even more determined to succeed.
A delightfully informative combination of racing lore and a clever con.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-44057-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.
Time is fractured in this story of a woman’s life as a child, college student, and 20-something set against the development of the atomic bomb and efforts to land the first man on the moon.
When Annie Fisk was a child growing up in New Mexico, she had a best friend, Diana, who would appear and disappear in her backyard. A number of small trinkets appeared and disappeared in the same way. As Annie grew up, she decided her friend must have been imaginary, and she never told her mother or her father—a physicist working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos—about it. After her father’s death and her graduation from high school, Annie headed to college in San Antonio, where she met and fell in love with Evelyn, a fellow college student with dreams of being a painter. But, drawn by an imaginary thread, Annie leaves Evelyn after graduation to move to Houston, with the goal of working for NASA. And she does—starting as a secretary, and then moving into programming. What begins as a straightforward story veers into science fiction territory almost unexpectedly as Annie discovers a wormhole and begins to research and test the implications of that finding with a colleague. Explorations of love, loss, science, and the edges of the universe and what is—and is not—possible in the space-time continuum collide in this story; it's reminiscent of the thoughtfulness, matter-of-fact science, and female strength of Connie Willis’ well-known time traveling series beginning with Doomsday Book (1992) as well as the world portrayed in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures (2016).
A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780593543887
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Neither the characters nor the mystery makes nearly as much of an impression as the setting and the cuisine.
More accurately, Four Murders Most French, since none of the homicides entangling Julia Child’s circle in postwar Paris seems any more Gallic than the others.
Joining Julia at a tasting during a monthly meeting of her wine club at L’École du Cordon Bleu, her neighbor, friend, and amanuensis Tabitha Knight is on hand to watch Chef Richard Beauchêne taste his very last wine, an 1893 Volnay Clos de la Rougeotte that he samples just before keeling over. Cyanide, thinks Tabitha, whose determination to stay away from anymore murders is on a collision course with her sense that she’s channeling Agatha Christie. Although Inspecteur Étienne Merveille wholeheartedly endorses her reluctance to get involved, she’s left with little choice after she recognizes Louis Loyer at another event as the chef who was arguing with Beauchêne on the evening of his last libation only moments before Loyer uncorks an 1871 Sauternes that turns out to be his last round as well. Assuming that the two poisonings (more will follow) can’t be a coincidence, Tabitha wonders if it’s a coincidence that she’s been on the scene for both of them and begins to make a cautious list of other people who were present for both deaths. Considering that she’s not much more interested in the suspects than her author, Tabitha does a highly effective job of identifying the culprit and tipping her hand in a way that forces her once again to employ her Swiss Army knife to rescue herself from certain death.
Neither the characters nor the mystery makes nearly as much of an impression as the setting and the cuisine.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781496739629
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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