Strong female characters and engaging historical nuggets result in a satisfying read.
A young widow fights her late husband’s family and social convention to retain control of his struggling San Francisco newspaper in Blanton-Stroud’s historical novel.
When Edward Zimmer died suddenly of a heart attack, he left his 29-year-old wife Sandy his 35% share of the San Francisco Prospect, as well as his position as the twice-daily newspaper’s publisher. But in the three years since, it is her father-in-law Wyatt Zimmer and the board of directors who have assumed the roles of decision-makers. Now, Wyatt wants to sell the paper, a business venture he had always opposed. However, today, VJ day, is a time to celebrate: The Second World War has finally ended with the unconditional surrender of Japan. The streets of San Francisco are filled with revelry, but the abundance of alcohol is resulting in dangerously drunken crowds that are causing mayhem. When Wyatt denigrates her ability to run the paper in front of the board, she decides to investigate for herself what is happening on the streets. Sandy observes that the police are outnumbered and the hospitals are overrun—the city’s powers-that-be have been caught flatfooted. At least six rape victims are treated at the hospital, and there are 13 deaths. What she experiences and learns during this night of violence transforms her. Blanton-Stroud’s engaging narrative is a follow-up to her earlier Jane Benjamin novels about a hard-nosed, intrepid reporter at the Prospect, and Jane returns here to play a pivotal role in Sandy’s development from an insecure people-pleaser into a dynamic force in the male-dominated publishing industry. Determined to get justice for the rape victims and accountability from government officials (“all of them should face consequences for their actions or inactions”), Sandy compellingly finds her voice and her backbone as she battles Wyatt and the board for control of the paper. Inspired by oft-ignored historical details from the 1945 riots, Blanton-Stroud has composed a well-paced, edgy tale that is a salute to solid, honest journalism.
Strong female characters and engaging historical nuggets result in a satisfying read.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781647429461
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
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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