An ingenious crime drama seamlessly woven into the backdrop of post–World War II England.
An inexperienced British solicitor—tasked with recovering a prominent woman’s missing child—finds himself embroiled in a murder mystery.
In this novel set in England in 1952, Toby Whitby is a newly minted solicitor, awkward and less than inspiring, which makes it all the more unusual when he lands a major case. Lady Sylvia, countess of Southwold, wants to recover her daughter, Celeste, who she claims was abducted by Vera Chapman, a poor village girl. Lady Sylvia conceived the child with Jack Harrigan, an American Army officer who was killed in Normandy in World War II. Since the countess cannot have another baby, Celeste is the sole heir to the considerable Southwold estate. Lady Sylvia was falsely told the child died in an air raid during the war but later discovered otherwise and asked her lawyer, Robert Alderton of Champion and Company in Brighton, to handle the legalities. But Alderton was found dead, violently murdered, and the file regarding Lady Sylvia’s case is mysteriously missing. Since Toby is now the only healthy solicitor at the firm—Edwin Champion is too unwell to manage the matter—he’s saddled with this responsibility. Toby turns out to be smarter than first impressions would indicate, and he begins to suspect that Lady Sylvia’s story is apocryphal, especially after her disgruntled gardener, Sam Ruddle, claims the child properly belongs to Vera. Shortly after, Sam is nearly murdered by a woman, hit over the head just as Alderton was. Whether or not Lady Sylvia is telling the truth, she has a motive to lie. Without a proper successor to the estate, it could become the property of her Australian relatives upon her death. Unmoved by tradition, they would surely sell it for quick cash. In this series opener, Hodgetts (Imposter, 2019, etc.) adroitly constructs a labyrinthine plot of the best kind—complexly entangled enough to foil readers’ anticipations but not convoluted or impenetrable. In fact, the story races to a stunning conclusion at a relentless pace, a peculiar but artfully plausible tale. At the heart of the narrative is Toby, a delicately drawn character: Diffident and bumbling, he’s also surprisingly perspicacious, charming, and even capable of great bravery. He was forced to sit out the war because of his poor eyesight but still managed to risk his life to save a group of children from perishing during an air raid. The author brilliantly inserts the conflict into the mystery as well. The disappearance of the child revolves around an air raid, and various characters remember that fateful day and, by extension, the wages of war itself, in different ways. And the entire ravaged country is a monument to those dark years, something observed by Toby, who can’t wait to leave: “For the first time in years, Toby was able to assess his surroundings without a paralyzing sadness for the destruction of his homeland; for the historic buildings that had been reduced to dust, for the ruined beaches, and the shattered dreams of a generation.”
An ingenious crime drama seamlessly woven into the backdrop of post–World War II England.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Emerge Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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