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THE DRACULA DOSSIER

Gore and gothic trappings mask a thin, wobbly plot.

Reese (The Book of Shadows, 2002, etc.) sends Jack the Ripper after Bram Stoker in yet another fog-laden tale of mutilation.

Giving the man who invented Dracula a horror story of his own, the author re-creates Stoker’s real-life world and friends: theater impresario Henry Irving, novelist Thomas Henry Hall Caine, Lady Jane Wilde (Oscar’s mom) and assorted others. Their fictional adventures are chronicled in Stoker’s journals, correspondence and press clippings, contained in a dossier that turns up when an anonymous correspondent forwards them to a present-day editor at William Morrow. Reese relegates whatever insights these documents offer into the writer’s creativity to an annoying plethora of footnotes. He’s after bloodier stuff, and he delivers it when Stoker, at Lady Wilde’s behest, visits a session of the Order of the Golden Dawn. There he espies Dr. Francis Tumblety, an American quack physician, at the center of a phantasmagoric ritual replete with scorpions, bleeding wounds and writhing serpents. From then on, Tumblety, possessed by an evil spirit, stalks Stoker, intoning his name in the London streets and leaving a dead cat and mouse and bags of blood at the author’s home. Stoker learns from Caine that Tumblety’s wardrobe holds jars containing preserved “female organs of generation,” which the demented doctor obtained from physicians and body snatchers. The American also holds a stash of letters detailing an intimate affair he shared with Caine, thus preventing Stoker’s friend from turning to police for fear of arrest for indecent behavior. When someone begins carving up London prostitutes, the killer’s handiwork is described explicitly and gratuitously in news accounts and police reports. Convinced that Tumblety is the serial murderer, Stoker dubs him Jack the Ripper as he, Caine and Lady Wilde plot none too cleverly to bring down the bloodthirsty villain.

Gore and gothic trappings mask a thin, wobbly plot.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-06-123354-8

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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