A thrilling crime drama, suspenseful and thoughtful.
In Crandell’s novel, a detective is hired by Jack Kennedy, a young congressman, to protect him from charges of murder.
Private eye Jack Griffin meets Jack Kennedy at a dinner hosted by the Army and Navy Club and finds a supremely charming man with a ribald humor. Both men are quickly infatuated with Betty Dyson, a beautiful, flirtatious woman, but Kennedy is the one who takes her home. The next day she’s discovered murdered—savagely beaten, stabbed, and maybe raped. Kennedy immediately hires Griffin to conduct an investigation of his own. He claims to be innocent, and he’s worried what even the rumor of a lurid crime would do to his political career, especially as a congressman representing a Catholic district. Griffin believes in his innocence, if only for the moment, and agrees to examine the case, partly motivated by anger that a woman he admired could be so unjustly treated. The pressure to solve the case quickly is enormous—Betty worked for Stuart Symington, the assistant secretary of war, and was married to Col. Don Dyson, a war hero and “famous fighter ace.” Given all those involved and the gruesome nature of the murder, the case is sure to garner national media attention. Crandell crafts not only a tantalizingly complex crime—one with conspiratorial proportions—but also deftly limns an atmosphere of gloomy transgression and a dark world of crime and subterfuge. His writing, however, can be read as overwrought or good, campy fun; consider Griffin’s warning to a dirty cop: “Make one wrong move, and I’ll blow a tunnel in you they can use to drive cars through from Annapolis to the Eastern Shore, beach traffic through one side and westbound back through the other.” For all its literary limitations, including its tendency to reproduce the tropes of a well-worn genre, this is a captivating read intelligently rendered.
A thrilling crime drama, suspenseful and thoughtful.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Hawkshaw Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The youngest Ryans will please fans of the genre.
The U.S. president’s son lands in the middle of a West African coup in this latest Clancy thriller.
Kyle Ryan is part of a three-man Defense Intelligence Agency team covertly installing cyber communications in Luanda, Angola. His two colleagues are murdered, and he must “run or die.” The Naval Academy grad isn’t a warrior like his older brother, Jack Junior, who sits out this story. President Ryan doesn’t even know his son is in Africa, let alone how much trouble Kyle is in. Then the unit of Navy Lieutenant Commander (and big sister) Katie Ryan gets the call to rescue Americans as an Angolan man, Victor Baptista, tries to overthrow the current democratically elected president. “Fear was the most powerful weapon in Angola,” and Baptista inspires a great deal of it. Too bad for him that the Ryan family never knuckles under to fear. Captured, hooded, and in danger of execution, Kyle has a steadfast bravery that reflects the Ryan DNA. Baptista doesn’t realize at first that among his American prisoners is President Ryan’s son. Oops. Well, with U.S. warships fast approaching Angolan shores, he thinks he can strike a deal with the “fickle and feckless Americans.” A more tuned-in advisor lets Baptista know that President Ryan will never negotiate, even with his son’s life on the line. So this isn’t just the United States the terrorist is dealing with, but the Ryan family. Katie and Kyle use their intelligence, not brute force, while a pissed-off papa bear wields his awesome executive power from the White House. Meanwhile, Baptista’s murderous cruelty leaves his aides and lackeys trembling in fear. This novel looks like Katie and Kyle’s debuts as central characters, and they are Ryans through and through—they run toward trouble, and they have no faults worth mentioning. Parental and filial loyalty mix well with the action and add interest to an otherwise standard (but good) Clancy thriller.
The youngest Ryans will please fans of the genre.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593718063
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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