The ancient diary is marginally more entertaining than the contemporary romantic mystery, which is neither very romantic nor...
On the Isle of Capri, classical scholars compete against cult members searching for a long-lost Pythagorean manuscript in the latest from Goodman (The Sonnet Lover, 2007, etc.), who specializes in mysteries polished with a patina of highbrow culture.
Classics professor Sophie Chase is attending a department meeting at the University of Texas when the crazed boyfriend of her prized student Agnes, a beautiful small-town innocent, comes in shooting. The department secretary and a professor die. The meeting concerned a trip to Capri being organized by Sophie’s former mentor, and lover, Elgin, to research an important manuscript recently discovered in a house under excavation. Soon Sophie, at Elgin’s prodding, takes the place of her dead colleague on the expedition. In Italy, as first-century historian Phineas Aulus’s unbelievably detailed diary is translated daily for the researchers, readers are treated to a sordid story of sexual/religious rites in the days before the Vesuvius eruption. Meanwhile Elgin (whose sister was lost to a cult) warns Sophie that the FBI has informed him that someone from the Tetraktys, a creepy, possibly violent cult of devotees to the teachings of Pythagoras, has infiltrated the research team. Sophie has connections to Tetraktys. Her great love Ely disappeared into the Tetraktys compound years ago, although she blames her affair with Elgin as much as the cult for their breakup. Sophie doesn’t completely trust Elgin, whom she assumes is dallying with Agnes, and finds herself attracted to her wealthy host, who’s funding the project. When Agnes and Simon, another researcher, are trapped in the excavated tunnels, Agnes barely escapes with her own life. Simon dies in the hospital. Then Ely shows up claiming he has left the cult and with warnings of his own for Sophie. Whom can she trust? Readers will decipher the answer early on. For a professor, Sophie is slow on the uptake.
The ancient diary is marginally more entertaining than the contemporary romantic mystery, which is neither very romantic nor mysterious.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-47960-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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