In their fifth adventure, Kasasian’s mismatched detective team (The Secrets of Gaslights Lane, 2017, etc.) is in fine form...
A Victorian detective with a unique style and the ward who doubles as his assistant track down a serial rapist.
Sidney Grice—“the finest personal detective in the empire,” as he announces himself—is a man of impossibly high standards, extraordinarily keen senses, finicky personal habits, a relentless devotion to the truth that outweighs all tact, a tendency to lose his glass eyeball at inopportune times, and little regard for women apart from Connie Middleton, the mother of his ward, March Middleton. March herself is ever the butt of Sidney’s scorn, and he also wastes little patience on his latest client, Lucy Bocking, who was assaulted, beaten, and slashed. Sidney is scarcely more sympathetic to Lucy’s friend Freda Wilde, hideously disfigured by fire and left without relatives when Steep House, her family home, burned down. Lucy’s house next door escaped the fire, and she took in Freda as a companion—and a rather resentful one at times, because her wounds, unlike Lucy’s, will never heal. The chief suspect in the assault, the German Kaiser’s second cousin Prince Ulrich Schlangezahn, was implicated in an earlier rape. March tries in vain to entrap him in the same opium den where Lucy and Freda were attacked. A second attempt with some of her friends goes terribly wrong, and a related case of a missing person ends in a shocking mutilation. The only bright spot in March’s life is Inspector George Pound, who finally proposes to her. Although she gladly accepts, she can’t seem to find the chance to tell her guardian, for they’re both too intent on capturing the man who has stalked numerous women in London and marked their foreheads with a sinister symbol. The outcome will leave more than a few readers feeling repulsed and betrayed.
In their fifth adventure, Kasasian’s mismatched detective team (The Secrets of Gaslights Lane, 2017, etc.) is in fine form for fans who like convoluted plots, lovingly detailed gore, and mean-spirited humor. The squeamish should approach with caution or not at all.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-564-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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