An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case.
Murder in Kyiv in the Bolshevik Revolution’s aftermath.
In the first of a projected series, the prominent Ukrainian novelist Kurkov introduces Samson Kolechko, an unemployed electrical engineer who lands a detective job in 1919, launching him into the investigation of a theft that evolves into the pursuit of a murderer that almost claims his life. After his father is slaughtered in the street by Cossack marauders and his own right ear is severed in the attack, Samson finds himself isolated in his Kyiv flat until some of his space is appropriated by two Red Army soldiers. When he reports their theft of his father’s beloved desk to the local police station, he’s improbably offered a job as a detective to help stem the tide of property crimes in a city that’s roiled by violence in the unsettled aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. With relative swiftness but no small amount of personal peril, Samson follows a trail that eventually leads to the discovery of a theft of silver objects, including the eponymous body part, after he survives an ambush and is nearly murdered alongside a soldier who’d been assisting him and a witness in the case. He’s aided in his pursuit of their killer by his friendship with Nadezhda, a young woman who works in Kyiv’s census office and has become the object of Samson’s romantic interest. Kurkov deepens his story with a vivid portrait of Kyiv that emphasizes the city’s “atmosphere of fear and danger” and considerable material deprivation in the wake of Russia’s epochal political change. Samson and his colleagues must function in what amounts to a barter economy that involves frequent nighttime blackouts caused by the theft of the firewood fueling Kyiv’s power plant, along with food and water shortages. It’s a bleak, but fitting, backdrop to one man’s grimly determined quest for justice.
An atmospheric police procedural whose protagonist battles personal tragedy and a tangled system to solve his first case.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063352285
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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