A deeply emotional read. And when the action is over, the coda could water an atheist’s eye.
A priest in Vatican City leads a perilous rescue effort surrounded by Rome’s Nazi occupiers.
In 1943 and 1944, Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann terrorizes a starving Rome. But he is forbidden to enter Vatican City, at one-fifth of a square mile, the tiniest country in the world. If Jews or escaped Allied POWs can manage to get there, they may have a chance to be smuggled to safety. The novel is inspired by a real historical figure named Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish envoy to the Vatican. O’Flaherty and a small group go to great lengths to secretly aid as many people as they can. Discovery means death, so the group uses elaborate ruses—they form a choir as a cover, and O’Flaherty quietly passes along individual instructions during choir practice. They speak in code—“Books in the Library” means escapees being protected. It’s a risky game they’re about. Hitler only tolerates the Vatican’s existence and could wipe it out in the blink of an eye, so O’Flaherty’s superiors are deeply uneasy about the monsignor’s activities. Meanwhile, Hauptmann knows there is an Escape Line, and he is eager to prove it. And given that his “favoured interrogation tool is the blowtorch,” his odds look better than O’Flaherty’s. But the “nuisance of a priest” is not nicknamed Hughdini for nothing, and he is moral to his core. If the story were told in typical thriller style, emphasizing action over language, it would still be good, but O’Connor’s phrasings are a special joy. One unnamed cardinal is “a long drink of cross-eyed, buck-toothed misery if ever there was, he’d bore the snots off a wet horse.” On Christmas Eve, three bitterly cold German soldiers are invited indoors for some holiday cheer. They are “fine examples of the super-race”: One of them is “a haddock-faced, lumpenshouldered, Wurst-fingered corner boy, that ugly the tide wouldn’t take him out.” And the Vatican Embassy has “rats you could saddle.”
A deeply emotional read. And when the action is over, the coda could water an atheist’s eye.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-60945-835-5
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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