A dramatic and historically captivating political tale.
As President John Tyler prepares to expand slavery in the United States in 1844, a trio of young men plot his assassination in this novel.
After President William Henry Harrison dies barely a month into his term, Tyler takes over, an unpopular man derisively referred to as “His Accidency.” He’s an utter disaster for the Whig Party—he summarily upends its legislative agenda, including a proposal for a national bank. To make matters worse, he plans the annexation of Texas, a move that would produce a dramatic expansion of slavery and upset the delicate balance between Northern and Southern states struck by the Compromise of 1820. Monty Tolliver, a young man who got his start in Washington, D.C., working for Sen. Henry Clay, firmly opposes slavery. Monty sees Tyler’s presidency as a fiasco and its possible extension in the election of 1844 as catastrophic. Ben Geddis, one of his closest friends and a staunch abolitionist, proposes a radical solution to save the country—assassinate Tyler. Monty joins forces with Ben and Sam Shipley, another friend, to gauge the possibility. The dangerous mission causes Monty to have deep reservations, though he desperately wants to oust the “slaveholder-in-chief” from power: “Was he a bad person, he wondered, for having such thoughts?” Haynes paints a historically authentic and dramatically gripping tableau of the tumultuous politics of the time as well as the nuances surrounding the debate over slavery. In particular, he limns an intriguing portrait of Clay, a monumental figure in American history. This is a rigorously researched novel. The daunting challenge for the author was to make plausible not only the perilous plot conceived, but also the psychology of the conspirators—three otherwise sane, law-abiding citizens who plan a premeditated murder of national significance. Haynes does in fact make this believable, an impressive literary feat.
A dramatic and historically captivating political tale.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1737766902
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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