An intriguing and enjoyable game of cat and mouse that involves catching a killer.
In this World War II novel, a cryptic message left on the body of a murder victim in 1942 San Francisco focuses the FBI’s attention on a small group of German sympathizers funded by the Nazi regime.
The body of Charles Brown, former president of the local “America First Committee,” is found in his Hatzfeld Enterprises office. On his corpse is a handwritten sign that reads “Traitor.” Below that are the words “The Grynszpan Group.” The police chief has brought in his go-to investigator for national security matters, former San Francisco Police Commissioner Tony Bosco. DS Dennis Sullivan, who worked with Tony on an earlier case, explains the Grynszpan allusion, which references a young, disgruntled Polish Jewish loner who, in 1938, killed a German Parisian Embassy official. Is this the work of Jewish terrorists? The second member of Tony’s team, Ruthie Fuller, says they must consult with her friend Jacob Weiss, an FBI agent handling Nazi, Fascist, and Communist subversion cases. In a compelling narrative side trip, Issel takes readers back to 1938 to build the poignant backstory for Jacob, the novel’s complex and conflicted lead character. Born in San Francisco, Jacob was raised in Vienna and then relocated to Palestine with his parents and sister after the rise of Hitler. Two years later, his family was murdered by an Arab terrorist in a tragedy that sets the course of the teenager’s life. He joined Capt. Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squad, a contingent of Jewish soldiers recruited to protect Jewish settlers, and Jacob’s experience in the group ultimately led him back to the city of his birth. The author, a history scholar, lays out a vivid, disturbing portrait of San Francisco just entering the war, a city terrified of foreign attacks; rife with antisemitism, racial bigotry, and ethnic discrimination; and politically and socially roiled by anti-immigrant fervor. But his mixture of history, well-paced action scenes, and an entertaining investigation of a series of mysterious murders occasionally becomes subsumed by superficial on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand conversations among the central Jewish characters about Zionism. This is a curious debate given their knowledge, albeit rudimentary, of what is already befalling European Jews.
An intriguing and enjoyable game of cat and mouse that involves catching a killer.Pub Date: May 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-926664-75-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Carleton Street Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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