A fast-paced espionage thriller that’s undermined by a lack of freshness.
A clandestine alliance, dedicated to preserving Christianity from communism and fascism, undertakes a dangerous covert mission in Stalin’s Russia in Keating’s historical thriller.
In 1928, shortly before Moscow’s St. Michael’s Lutheran Church is to be demolished by Soviet authorities, Pastor Gabriel Fischer finds a remarkable religious relic: the first translation of the Bible into Russian, accomplished by theologian Johann Ernst Glück. He quickly transports the work to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where it is to be hidden, and then he’s summarily executed in a planned hitalong with his friend Eckhart Konig. Meanwhile, a priest and a Lutheran pastor—Patrick O’Riley and Eric Meyer—intervene heroically during an assassination attempt on another man of the cloth, John Rose, during a symposium at Georgetown University. The assassins turn out to be agents sent by Stalin. O’Riley and Meyer’s exploits impress the Alliance of Saint Michael, a secretive organization, both for their quick action in the face of danger and for their profound appreciation of the threat communism and fascism pose to Christian civilization. The pair accept an invitation to join the group and are tasked with recovering Glück’s Bible before the cathedral is destroyed. Keating’s book is vigorously paced overall; there’s no deficit of action or intrigue in these pages. However, the book as a whole feels rather stale, and readers likely won’t be able to escape the sense that they have read a book very much like this one before. The secret society at the heart of the novel, in particular, is formulaic stuff that readers of the cloak-and-dagger genre will certainly be familiar with. Moreover, the prose is similarly unspectacular—clumsy and earnest, with a tendency toward melodrama: “The communists had made clear that religion and the Church were enemies of the State, and destined for annihilation.”
A fast-paced espionage thriller that’s undermined by a lack of freshness.Pub Date: May 5, 2022
ISBN: 979-8818739762
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2022
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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