Appealing mainly for well-rounded characters, not plot.
In Perry’s latest Daniel Pitt mystery, the young barrister and his friends grapple with a serial killer terrorizing London.
It’s a cold, wet February in 1912 London, and the forecast calls for murder. A thorny assault case has landed on Daniel’s desk, and the second casualty of the so-called Rainy-day Slasher is now in the morgue being examined by Daniel’s friend Dr. Miriam fford Croft, a newly minted pathologist. Lena Madden, the second victim, like the first, Sandrine Bernard, was in her 20s. Like Sandrine, Lena was viciously stabbed, and part of her index finger on her dominant hand was severed. Soon, a third body, that of middle-aged banker Roger Haviland, is found, similarly mutilated. All the crimes occurred during blinding rain, in late afternoon or evening darkness. The police, spearheaded by Daniel’s fellow Cambridge alum Inspector Ian Frobisher, focus their investigation on what, if anything, connected the three in life. Much prevarication ensues as Frobisher and his ad hoc team of Miriam; her boss, Dr. Evelyn Hall; and Daniel mull over whether or not the murders could have been random, committed by more than one person, copycat crimes, etc. The only commonality that emerges, in an information deficit seemingly intended to enhance suspense, is that each victim had been, at one time or another, a Cambridge student. Two were acquainted with suburban vicar Richard Rhodes and his wife, Polly, who also have Cambridge ties. An apparent red herring is Daniel’s new case defending Cambridge history professor Nicholas Wolford, who, in a scuffle over a groundless accusation of plagiarism, broke his accuser’s nose and jaw. Much backstory about Miriam’s and Dr. Eve’s struggles to succeed in a field closed to women, and many interviews among and between the above characters, warmed by those English creature comforts of tea, shortbread, and coal fires, drain tension from the story until the hurried and minimally foreshadowed close.
Appealing mainly for well-rounded characters, not plot.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35873-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family.
“Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive—“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”—Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. While she never overcomes her low self-esteem about her looks, Elsa displays an iron core of character and courage as she faces dust storms, floods, hunger riots, homelessness, poverty, the misery of migrant labor, bigotry, union busting, violent goons, and more. The pedantic aims of the novel are hard to ignore as Hannah embodies her history lesson in what feels like a series of sepia-toned postcards depicting melodramatic scenes and clichéd emotions.
For devoted Hannah fans in search of a good cry.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2501-7860-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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