Continuing Smith’s Courtney family epic (Assegai, 2009, etc.), this novel focuses on big-game hunter Leon and his daughter, Saffron, during the post–World War I era, first on their great Kenya estate, Lusima, and then as they move toward the bloody fray that became World War II.
It’s an action-packed affair beginning in Africa with coltish young Saffron outdoing the boys on horseback, then attacking Saint Moritz’s men-only Cresta Run skeleton-racing course, and ending with her manning a Vickers gun to protect the Greek nation’s gold bullion reserves. The tale regularly shifts to Leon, too, but Saffron’s adventures extend the Courtney legend, including when she falls in love with an "immediate, instinctive, animal passion" worthy of her clan. The attitude throughout is Old World British colonial, as is the dialogue. There’s more than one reference to "the local peasantry." Saffron attends school in South Africa and Oxford. There she makes German friends who will lead to connections regarding her father’s fortune and makes a disconcerting reacquaintance with his old enemies, the von Meerbach dynasty. As this story ends, Saffron is spotted by a mysterious older gentlemen connected to Britain’s Special Operations Executive, while the man who stirred her animal passion is witness to the Babi Yar massacre. Meanwhile, Leon’s been forced to helm the family's Cairo-based business, which is threatened by brother Frank’s worship of Oswald Mosley. With cameo appearances by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hitler, and Reinhard Heydrich and traveling everyplace from the Ritz in London to a Masai village, the story is wonderfully plotted, woven together by quick but not disconcerting cinematic shifts from scene to scene in a narrative that keeps the pages turning.
Occasionally melodramatic, sometimes grandiloquent; those who liked Wouk’s War and Remembrance will certainly enjoy this Smith saga.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-227649-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.
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The versatile and accomplished McBride (Five Carat Soul, 2017, etc.) returns with a dark urban farce crowded with misjudged signals, crippling sorrows, and unexpected epiphanies.
It's September 1969, just after Apollo 11 and Woodstock. In a season of such events, it’s just as improbable that in front of 16 witnesses occupying the crowded plaza of a Brooklyn housing project one afternoon, a hobbling, dyspeptic, and boozy old church deacon named Cuffy Jasper "Sportcoat" Lambkin should pull out a .45-caliber Luger pistol and shoot off an ear belonging to the neighborhood’s most dangerous drug dealer. The 19-year-old victim’s name is Deems Clemens, and Sportcoat had coached him to be “the best baseball player the projects had ever seen” before he became “a poison-selling murderous meathead.” Everybody in the project presumes that Sportcoat is now destined to violently join his late wife, Hettie, in the great beyond. But all kinds of seemingly disconnected people keep getting in destiny's way, whether it’s Sportcoat’s friend Pork Sausage or Potts, a world-weary but scrupulous white policeman who’s hoping to find Sportcoat fast enough to protect him from not only Deems’ vengeance, but the malevolent designs of neighborhood kingpin Butch Moon. All their destines are somehow intertwined with those of Thomas “The Elephant” Elefante, a powerful but lonely Mafia don who’s got one eye trained on the chaos set off by the shooting and another on a mysterious quest set in motion by a stranger from his crime-boss father’s past. There are also an assortment of salsa musicians, a gentle Nation of Islam convert named Soup, and even a tribe of voracious red ants that somehow immigrated to the neighborhood from Colombia and hung around for generations, all of which seems like too much stuff for any one book to handle. But as he's already shown in The Good Lord Bird (2013), McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence.
An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1672-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Black takes time out from chronicling the neighborhood-themed exploits of half-French detective Aimée Leduc to introduce a heroine as American as apple pie.
Kate Rees never expected to see Paris again, especially not under these circumstances. Born and bred in rural Oregon, she earned a scholarship to the Sorbonne, where she met Dafydd, a handsome Welshman who stole her heart. The start of World War II finds the couple stationed in the Orkney Islands, where Kate impresses Alfred Stepney of the War Department with the rifle skills she developed helping her dad and five brothers protect the family’s cattle. After unimaginable tragedy strikes, Stepney recruits Kate for a mission that will allow her to channel her newly ignited rage against the Germans who’ve just invaded France. She’s parachuted into the countryside, where her fluent French should help her blend in. Landing in a field, she hops a milk train to Paris, where she plans to shoot Adolf Hitler as he stands on the steps of Sacre-Coeur. Instead, she kills his admiral and has to flee through the streets of Paris, struggling to hook up with the rescuers who are supposed to extract her. Meanwhile, Gunter Hoffman, a career policeman in a wartime assignment with the Reichssicherheitsdienst security forces, is charged with finding the assassin who dared attempt to kill the Führer. It’s hard to see how it can end well for both the cop and the cowgirl. The heroine’s flight is too episodic to capitalize on Black’s skill at character development, but she’s great at raising readers’ blood pressure.
A killer thriller.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Categories: CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | THRILLER | HISTORICAL THRILLER | HISTORICAL FICTION | SUSPENSE
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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