A tale delivers an escape to gorgeous Carmel and an engaging mystery.
In this whodunit set in 1924, a famous painter in Carmel, California, is found dead on the beach and the authorities claim that she killed herself.
Sarah Cunningham is the doubting sister who has always lived in artist Ada Belle Davenport’s shadow. While conflicted, she is still determined to do right by her big sister. Alvin Judd, a bumptious marshal, conducted the inquest into Ada’s death with unseemly haste before Sarah could get to California from Paris, where she herself is an artist. She isn’t buying the suicide report. There are other doubters. One is Rosie McCann, a bit of a Miss Marple, who is sure that Ada was murdered and is willing to help. Then there is the mysterious Sirena Kassajara-Silvia, who is a walking web of lies; the unscrupulous gallery owner Paul deVrais, whom Ada recently cut ties with; and the dreamboat Robert Pierce, a professional photographer whom Sarah is falling for. Throw in fake suicide notes, forged paintings, and the fact that Ada was pregnant and excited to marry her lover, the actor Alain Delacroix, and things get really interesting. Sarah is living in Ada’s house with her sister’s Jack Russell terrier, Albert, a bit of a sleuth himself. Scary things happen in that house. True to trope, the climactic scene has the hero fighting for her life. Of course, Ada was murdered; the clues are a bit of a murky mix; and readers may suss out the killer before the climax. But FitzPatrick keeps the pot stirred nicely, with revelations popping up like whack-a-mole. There is also a nice sense of scene, capturing this idyllic place on the Monterey peninsula. And the author brings in subthemes, like the racial animosity toward the Japanese (Sirena is half Japanese), which is cringingly portrayed; the rampant male chauvinism of art critics; and the influence of the rumrunners (this is Prohibition, but the taps seem to be wide open in Carmel and Monterey). While FitzPatrick is not in the first rank of crime novelists, she weaves a satisfying story.
A tale delivers an escape to gorgeous Carmel and an engaging mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64-742169-4
Page Count: 328
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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