Secrets catch up to Resistance heroes with startling effects in this fast-paced WWII mystery.
In Schulze’s historical thriller, a soldier-turned-Nazi-hunter fights for his life in occupied France.
The fog of war often yields no-win situations. However, the dangers facing William Gunnison seem more daunting than a battle-scarred soldier like himself might ordinarily expect. Stranded in German-occupied Paris, Gunnison is less intent on escaping with his life than he is on assassinating Adalwolf Bütz, a Nazi commandant whose bloodlust knows no bounds. However, the mission goes horribly wrong when Gunnison accidentally shoots and wounds Corey Baxter, an elderly American expatriate from a wealthy family, in the back. Gunnison’s unintended victim insists on being taken home to his abode in the French capital, and after he succumbs to his wounds, Jacques, Baxter’s faithful butler, reveals his employer’s dying wish—to inform his brother in New York City of his fate, and to get his servant to safety, away from the Nazis. Gunnison must contact Baxter’s mistrustful sibling using a coded prompt, “Olive branch,” whose origins prove troubling. As it turns out, Gunnison has secrets that have stark consequences for his fellow Resistance fighters, such as Nadine Sauvageot, whose identity is compromised due to her unlikely connection to him. Over the course of this novel, Schulze forces readers to confront the characters’ moral dilemmas: “He made mistakes….He was human.” It’s a brisk read, in addition to an exploration of its characters’ complex backstories. Overall, as World War II novels go, this one packs a roundhouse kick that present-day readers will feel sharply, as when Nadine tries to make her own way to New York, and a grim realization hits her: “We’re the unluckiest generation in the history of the world. We’re the ones born in Hell.”
Secrets catch up to Resistance heroes with startling effects in this fast-paced WWII mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781737037897
Page Count: 380
Publisher: David Schulze Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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