Appealing characters energize this well-written detective tale.
In this sequel, private eye Jack Fox juggles new fatherhood with chasing organ harvesters.
Jack learned he was a dad only six months ago when Enid Iglowski showed up at his door. Both he and his 17-year-old daughter struggle settling into their new, shared life. This may explain Enid’s anger issues, like clocking a bully at her Arizona school. While dealing with his daughter’s troubles, Jack takes on a missing person case. His new client, Layla Orlov, hasn’t seen her Russian mail-order-bride sister in nearly a month. In a concurrent plot, local police detective Bud Orlean gets a phone call on one of his “restricted work days,” as his heart disease has relegated him to part-time. He works a gang-style shooting, a crime scene trumped by what fills the victim’s car’s trunk—assorted organs, most likely for the black market. Bud soon realizes this organ-harvesting investigation has ties to Jack’s case. It’s hardly surprising that those behind these macabre crimes are dangerous, and they soon set their eyes on Enid. As if this weren’t enough for Jack to handle, his former lover and alleged serial killer Eve Hargrove hits him with a bit of blackmail. Evidently, she’s pregnant with their child while still behind bars and awaiting trial. If he doesn’t marry her, Eve vows to kill the unborn baby. Jack has a mind-boggling decision to make, all while trying to close his case and keep his teen daughter safe.
This follow-up to Gunning for Angels(2014) stars an indelible cast whose assumptions advance the plot. For example, Enid spots insurance forms on Jack’s desk and becomes convinced her dad has plans to kill her. It’s a humorously absurd claim that adults, especially her school counselor, take seriously. But it’s also indicative of the girl’s understandable fear of abandonment; she’s certain Jack will leave her. The father-daughter relationship is authentic, portraying challenging and endearing moments; Jack’s simple compliments (“You’re better than that”) have more impact on Enid than he knows or she’s willing to admit. Each character likewise has their share of strengths and weaknesses. Enid runs away from her problems but not when others need help, and hotheaded, promiscuous Jack proves a tenacious investigator. This melodrama-infused story isn’t a typical mystery; pieces of what Jack, Bud, and even Enid discover mostly fall into place without too much effort. Nevertheless, the trio of atypical detectives unquestionably faces cruel, frightening villains. Lewis builds nerve-wracking set pieces, and uses razor-sharp prose: “Behind the pretty brown eyes was a shade of cold calculation that Jack recognized all too well from the plethora of not-so-young-anymore moms looking for a bankroll.” In the same vein, the author doesn’t shy away from violent, sometimes grotesque imagery.
Appealing characters energize this well-written detective tale.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Cathleen A. McCarthy
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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