Darkly brooding horror hangs over Germany; an irresistible page-turner packed with historical detail and told from a most...
A movie star faces the nightmare of living in Nazi Germany in this second volume of a planned trilogy.
Clara Vine is an Anglo-German actress who has thus far succeeded in hiding the fact that she's of partially Jewish heritage. Her English lover, Leo Quinn, a passport control officer in Berlin, recruited her to spy "on the private life of the Third Reich" (The Scent of Secrets, 2015), and then shortly afterward, he disappeared. Clara travels to London in 1939 to attend a ball she's been invited to, given by a man she's never met, and finds that she's been summoned by a newly hatched espionage agency. British intelligence asks her to try to discover whether Hitler is planning to make a deal with the Soviets—and warns her to forget the missing Leo, who she refuses to believe is dead. Despite the assurances of the Führer, many Germans know that war is near. Back in Berlin, Clara—who's afraid her own apartment is being watched—is staying at a friend’s house near the Faith and Beauty Society headquarters, where Aryan girls are groomed to marry high-ranking Nazis. Clara is deeply disturbed when Lottie Franke, the most beautiful, talented, and unorthodox girl in the training program, is found murdered nearby. As an actress, Clara knows all the top-ranked Nazis and their wives and has opportunities to meet foreign reporters and travel abroad. On a trip to Paris for a photo shoot, she mistakes the handsome, wealthy Conrad Adler for Leo even though she’d already met the charismatic Obersturmbannführer at a party in Germany. She’s upset by both his pursuit of her and her physical response to him. On her return to Germany, she starts shooting a film under the direction of Leni Riefenstahl, looks for Lottie’s killer at the behest of the girl’s best friend, and tries to find out Hitler’s plans for war. The paranoid pressure-cooker atmosphere of Berlin forces her to make dangerous decisions every day.
Darkly brooding horror hangs over Germany; an irresistible page-turner packed with historical detail and told from a most unusual perspective.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-39386-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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