This overstuffed novel is heavy on suspicion and light on chemistry.
An engineer working on the Eiffel Tower draws the attention of a wealthy heir who may be more dangerous than he seems.
Fin Tighe, who has come to Paris from London to escape his cruel aristocratic father, has found some success as an engineer working with Gustave Eiffel. But he struggles to support himself and his cousin Aurélie, a ballerina he strives to protect from the lecherous men who prey on young dancers. While at one of her performances, Fin catches the eye of Gilbert Duhais, the nephew and heir of Michel de Genet, scion of a luxury department store that seeks to make inroads in the U.K. The meeting is fortuitous: Fin has been asked to drum up investments for the planned Eiffel Tower, an unpopular undertaking that has lost funding and threatens his and his employer’s financial solvency. Gilbert offers to introduce him to the wealthiest people in Parisian society but also reveals that he knows Fin’s father and was friends with Aurélie’s abusive brother. Despite his hesitancy, Fin allows Gilbert to advocate for him, and in time begins a romantic relationship that puts them both at risk. But as the two grow closer, danger mounts—one of Fin’s friends goes missing and another turns up dead. Soon Fin learns that Gilbert is more than his uncle’s accountant, and Fin must determine what the real motive is for his interest. With his convoluted backstory, Fin can be hard to empathize with. Stubborn and untrusting, he lacks any dynamism that would match Gilbert’s flair. Instead, the coupling seems random and without passion, and the mystery of why Gilbert has chosen to befriend him becomes tangled in too many potential connections between the two to make sense.
This overstuffed novel is heavy on suspicion and light on chemistry.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757802
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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
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