A host of minor mysteries enliven this magical tour of mystical lands.
A woman with magical powers starts a long and arduous journey not knowing what is to come.
The wizard Gurdyman, with whom Lassair has been living and studying in Cambridge in 1093, tells her that they must travel to Spain and sends her to her fenland home to pack her belongings, including the shining stone that reveals visions. Lassair wonders whether the trip is an effort to cheer her up after she’s lost the two loves of her life, Rollo to death and lawman Jack Chevestrier to stubbornness (The Rufus Spy, 2018). Before she and Gurdyman board the first of several ships that will take them to Spain, she visits her parents and her grandfather Thorfinn, from whom she’s inherited some of her powers and the shining stone. Gurdyman says that he wants to visit his own parents’ graves in Galicia, but Lassair suspects that he has other reasons for the trip. The owners of the inn that was once his parents’ greet the visitors with caution and even dislike, evoking memories of Gurdyman’s early brilliance and his determination to travel far to learn more. Using money Rollo left her, Lassair, noting Gurdyman’s failing health, buys a pony and cart for transport. After almost dying from poisoned water, both are rescued and taken to the City of Pearl, a haven for people of every religion. Gurdyman agrees to send Lassair to a magnificent cave in a high mountain region, where she’s tutored by Luliwa in the magical arts. Back in England, a man is found dead outside Gurdyman’s house,, a pearl clutched in his hand. Jack teams up with Lassair’s uncle Hrype to hunt down the wraithlike person who searched the house. Afraid for Lassair’s life, the pair engage Thorfinn and his ship to follow her. Much will be revealed but even more left for the next chapter in Lassair’s life.
A host of minor mysteries enliven this magical tour of mystical lands.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8898-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
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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