A tense, claustrophobic detective tale about the toll exacted on people trying to uncover the truth.
Fighting for the innocent might put you on the right side, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be safe.
When the mutilated body of a 7-year-old boy is found in the river of a big city, pollen and other debris on the corpse suggest he comes from a valley far away in a neighboring country. In Osborn’s unsettling debut, a biological anthropologist and her husband—who acts as her forensic team’s assistant, translator, and our narrator—get sent south by their agency to collect plant and mineral samples to confirm the boy’s identity. Their efforts overlap with the gruesome discovery of a mass grave, and the couple’s attempt to go home with the samples gets blocked by the country’s new regime. Why do they care about the child? Who is in the mass grave? Are these deaths somehow related? Osborn keeps a tight leash on the action as the couple seeks answers. They encounter a host of menacing characters in an unnamed country with a violent history that local officials dismiss. (“That is all in the past. It is over. That does not happen in the present time.…We are progressive!”) Conversations and the narrator’s commentary are restrained and opaque, often to a frustrating degree. “What’s happening to us?” the anthropologist demands of someone helping them. “Oh, you’ll need to find that out for yourselves” is all he’ll say. It’s clear Osborn wants readers to feel the same way while the couple searches for the murderer and possible motives. That search involves jungle treks, interrogation rooms, government double talk, and absurd bureaucratic dead ends worthy of Beckett or Kafka. All of this makes the pair burn for justice and feel “increasingly angry, against [their] instincts for self-preservation.” They resist the sensational conclusions of the authorities, locals, and even their superiors that the child was a victim of some strange ritual. Though the body’s dismemberment and objects found among the boy’s things seem to support that theory, the couple insists there’s a more sinister explanation. That insistence might put at risk their jobs, their relationship, and even their lives, but what haunts them more is the thought of giving up: “What are we if we let this go?” That’s a question neither wants to answer in this harrowing, tautly plotted story.
A tense, claustrophobic detective tale about the toll exacted on people trying to uncover the truth.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781954276406
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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