History, mythology, and mystery mix in a rollicking adventure that offers a fresh perspective on the famous Arthurian legend.
In 1396, a famous tracker of men and objects leaves London for the wilds of Cornwall in search of a fabulous treasure.
Crispin Guest and his apprentice, Jack Tucker (Traitor’s Codex, 2019, etc.), meet by chance with Carantok Teague, a Cornishman who offers them a large sum to help him track down the mythical Excalibur. Although neither is convinced the sword exists, they leave immediately on the long trip to Treknow, the closest village to Tintagel. Since Crispin, a disgraced but honorable former knight, refuses to participate in illegal treasure hunting, it’s fortunate that Teague has an old letter from King Edward III allowing him to search for treasure. A group of traveling players they encounter includes Kat Pyke, a former lover, burglar, and swindler who’s bested Crispin in the past. Crispin also meets the scholarly Marzhin Gwyls, a caretaker at Tintagel Castle, a crumpled ruin guarded by a few men at arms and a constable. On their first visit, Teague moves the heavy stone over the hole where he stores some of his treasures only to find the body of a man at arms. The castle constable asks Crispin to find Roger Bennet’s killer. The castle is barely guarded, and Bennet had a reputation as a womanizer who had earned the enmity of many a maiden. While Crispin investigates the murder, Jack helps Teague search for the sword, and Kat, always interested in items of value, seduces Crispin, who should know better. Among the suspects are the villagers, Bennet’s fellows at Tintagel, and hostile pagans living nearby. Teague, it turns out, does indeed have a nose for treasure, and the search looks to be successful if they’re not all killed off by the mysterious person who’s killed another man at arms and left Kat to take the blame.
History, mythology, and mystery mix in a rollicking adventure that offers a fresh perspective on the famous Arthurian legend.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8921-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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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