A rousing, detailed RAF thriller that delivers an effective climax.
A historical novel set in Britain before World War II focuses on a Royal Air Force officer.
Forsyth’s main character, RAF officer Allan Chadwick, returns to England after his adventures flying Vimy bombers in Iraq during the years preceding World War II. Chadwick is now assigned to the RAF aircraft research center at Farnborough, where he’s deeply involved in hammering out the workings of early warfare radar. He’s been tasked to create an investigative team to make formal reports on all aircraft accidents in Britain (he’s placidly warned that these probes can sometimes be “a little messy”). Unbeknown to him, he’s been identified by the Luftwaffe High Command as a possible target for subornation (“Young officer, not rich, may be open to bribery or possibly a little blackmail” goes the assessment). A covert Nazi mission code-named Amalgam sends lovely young Fraulein Inge Fischer to England in the guise of a German student visiting London. Chadwick’s own storyline is further tangled when he starts a relationship with Lady Melanie Fitzgibbon, who’s involved with a secretive political group dedicated to seeking appeasement with Germany. As these threads combine and plots mature on British soil, Chadwick finds himself at the center of high stakes and a climax full of breakneck action. Forsyth writes all this with a quick, dialogue-driven tempo that will keep readers turning the pages, with the narrative concentrating on both the nuts and bolts of bomber life in 1938 and the machinations of the Nazis in Europe and the pro-German forces in England. Forsyth’s portrayal of Chadwick is nicely textured—he’s a hero but a complex one—although not much of this multidimensionality extends to the rest of the book’s cast. Still, the snappy pacing and the sly undercurrent of humor (including a running gag about Chadwick’s behemoth old Bentley) keep the whole tale moving along briskly.
A rousing, detailed RAF thriller that delivers an effective climax.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9853220-0-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Yacht Fiona Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2022
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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