An informative and adventurous story of a wayward journey into another world.
A Silicon Valley programmer leaves his job to ride the rails with an elderly man in Davis’ novel.
At 26, Lynden Hoover has a fine career at Data Dynamics, a hot San Francisco Bay Area tech company. However, he starts to feel that his success is like a prison, and it’s one that he wants to escape: “All programmers were a little crazy up front,” he notes, “and all the good ones knew when to bail.” In sixth grade, he’d jumped on a freight train to search for his absent father, and he wants to roam free once again. It’s now the 1980s, and open boxcars abound, so Lynden hops on one of them and heads east. Along the way, he meets The Duke, an old-fashioned tramp who carries with him the language and customs of the past: “You fight like a punch-drunk Palooka,” he tells Lynden after one squabble. The Duke turns out to have a wealth of information about the locations of “hobo” camps, and he has dirt regarding dangerous characters. Of particular concern is Short Arm, a villainous scoundrel that The Duke claims will kill him on sight. Lynden, now dubbed “Frisco,” and The Duke roll past Reno, the Great Salt Lake, and Grand Junction, and The Duke says that Short Arm is headed to Pennsylvania. But Lynden has a secret that’s tormenting him—one that will bring him even deeper into a dangerous, transient world. Over the course of this novel, Davis presents readers with an adventure that also works well as a tribute to the past, effectively using the perspective of a young character to capture what feels like the last glimpse of a disappearing culture. Lynden’s interest in riding the rails isn’t merely a passing fancy, and the history that connects The Duke and Lynden brings up issues as varied as wanderlust, economics, and sexuality. The characters come across as convincing, real people, and the schemes that they hatch are generally fun. Although the first half of the novel suffers from a general talkiness and aimlessness, the second half establishes a much more clearly defined narrative that will engage readers.
An informative and adventurous story of a wayward journey into another world.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-951122-25-6
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Artemesia Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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