Hope, excitement, and tragedy will keep rapt readers reaching for their tissues.
Three strangers become friends amid the Nazi bombing of London.
In 1944, fierce aerial fighting rages over London as the bombs and rockets continue killing and maiming English civilians. A 13-year-old “East End bloke” navigates the rubble and looks for things to steal. He always wishes for inclement weather so the Jerries won’t bomb them. In the few pieces of clothing he owns, his gran has sewn a label: “The Honorable Charles Elias Matters,” with his address. His parents and grandfather have been killed, and Gran thinks Charlie is going to school every day. Instead, he’s decided to get his education on the street. The well-to-do 15-year-old Molly Wakefield returns from the safety of the countryside to her parents’ London house, but the parents are nowhere to be found, and she meets Charlie as he hides in her yard. Ignatius Oliver runs The Book Keep in Covent Garden, a shop started by his late wife, Imogen. Charlie sneaks in and nicks some money and a book filled with blank pages, imagining he can sell it for the paper, but when he realizes that Ignatius knows where he lives, he tries to return everything. Ignatius catches him, but lets him keep the book, which plays a fateful role when it changes hands again. Before long the three become friends, all sharing common bonds of danger, humanity, and heartbreaking loss. All have their complex stories: Despite her youth, Molly wants to treat the wounded, and she’s good at it; Ignatius is a part-time air warden who’s burdened by a dark secret about himself; and Charlie is party to a foot chase in which one of his mates and a police officer are accidentally killed. Charlie frets that he might hang. Meanwhile, the buzz of the V-1 rocket gives way to the silence of the V-2, and life or death are the devil’s toss of a coin. Baldacci weaves the trio’s lives together seamlessly, even though each comes from a different stratum of society.
Hope, excitement, and tragedy will keep rapt readers reaching for their tissues.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781538742051
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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