A short, enjoyable thriller with plenty of well-researched historical nuggets.
A veteran historical novelist homes in on one of Hitler’s last desperate hopes.
In 1944, the Nazis know they're losing the war. They’d developed the V1, a pilotless drone bomb its targets could hear coming, and now its successor, which strikes without warning. The Nazis call it Vergeltungswaffen Zwei, Vengeance Weapon Two. The V2 rockets are notoriously unreliable, though. Although they're aimed at Charing Cross Station in the heart of London, any strike within five miles is considered a success. Many hit English neighborhoods, killing dozens of civilians, while others explode at launch or veer off into the sea. Chapters of the novel alternate between the two sides, specifically between German engineers and British intelligence. Twenty-four-year-old intelligence analyst Kay Caton-Walsh is in a married man’s bed and survives a direct hit as floors of the building collapse around her. A half dozen people are killed and almost 300 injured. Meanwhile, German engineers work furiously to prepare missiles for launch from Belgium. Despite severe technical problems, they are under great pressure to produce the weapons in the thousands and rush them into service. The story has plenty of interesting details—for example, the bulk of Germany’s potato crop that year had been requisitioned to be distilled into alcohol for use as rocket fuel. British radar can spot the V2s in flight, but “where exactly were they coming from? That was the mystery.” If only the Brits could look at a rocket’s parabola and calculate its point of origin....Caton-Walsh volunteers to help find out: “I’m good at maths. I know how to use a slide rule.” She joins a team of women working on the problem. Readers may recognize Germany’s main rocket engineer, Wernher von Braun. Though he shows necessary fealty to the Nazi cause, his secret dream is to send a rocket to the moon. And if he has to do that from America, that’s another story.
A short, enjoyable thriller with plenty of well-researched historical nuggets.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65671-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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