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RED TIGER HUNTING

From the John Griffin Post Great War Mysteries series , Vol. 1

A rousing adventure in jazzy post–WWI Europe.

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A battle-scarred WWI veteran travels to Jazz Age Paris to find the missing daughter of a New York financier in Juden’s debut novel.

John Griffin dropped out of college to go to war and has just returned from Europe. He suffered some scarring, but his psychological damage runs deeper. John finds peacetime concerns to be trivial (“How could the humdrum, meaningless, contemptible lives of so many of the people I saw daily...warrant the extinction of the men I knew?”). He is aimless in New York when a Wall Street financier asks him to go on a mission. Harry Armistan’s daughter Patricia has married an Englishman named Gavin Kingsbury. They were supposed to visit Italy for their honeymoon, but they have disappeared. Harry has a financial stake in the matter also; Gavin was supposed to deliver some documents to men in London, but he didn’t. Intrigued, and encouraged by the large sum of money Harry is offering, John accepts the offer and sets out to find the missing couple. In England, Gavin’s sister, Sarah, becomes a distraction and a complication for John’s investigation, and a journey to Paris raises the stakes when it becomes clear that Europe’s fragile peace is under threat. Juden’s historical thriller transports the reader back in time and gives a convincing account of the postwar experience at home and abroad. John is battle weary but still young and eager for adventure while cunning enough to not buckle while handling a complex job. Many scenes are lengthy and the story is somewhat protracted, but the century-old settings are both familiar and sleek, and the characters (including real historical figures, such as war hero and jazz musician Eugene Bullard) are mysterious enough to keep the action scenes interesting.

A rousing adventure in jazzy post–WWI Europe.

Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2022

ISBN: 9798986790510

Page Count: 346

Publisher: 5PointsPress

Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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