The competent and exacting detective’s contacts and knowledge of Cork again help her solve a difficult mystery in fine...
In 1925 Cork, Ireland, a horrifying find in an old trunk leads an unlikely sleuth to further discoveries scarcely less shocking.
A smelly trunk arrives from the auction house of Mr. Hayes, a gift to the school from the Reverend Mother’s cousin Lucy. Instead of the expected old school books, it contains the dead body of Mr. Mulcahy, a wealthy tanner, packed with a bunch of decomposing skins. Mulcahy’s son Fred arrives on the scene just after the Reverend Mother opens the trunk; he was evidently expecting a different trunk, with a shipment of guns for the Irish Republican Army. Although he’s appalled to see his dead father, he’s so far from mourning the loss that he shoots the body through the heart before taking off. The Reverend Mother calls Inspector Patrick Cashman, a former pupil whom she and medical examiner Dr. Scher have helped before (A Shocking Assassination, 2016, etc.). Poor, clever Eileen, another former pupil, who works for a printer and is also involved with the Republicans, snatches Fred away from the police on her motorbike and barely escapes trouble herself when Fred tries to flee on a fishing trawler. The Reverend Mother meanwhile fills Patrick in on the Mulcahy family, a large group with a long-suffering wife and mother, who were just moving into a brand new house, selling the old one, and moving the tanning yard when Mulcahy was killed. The oldest daughter, Susan, wanted to become a doctor, but her father was determined to marry her instead to his business acquaintance Richard McCarthy, the executor of his will, who claims that they’ll need to sell the new house to support the family. Susan, who helped keep the books, is certain there’s plenty of money. With help from Eileen, she sets out to prove that McCarthy and a new lawyer are hiding it. There are so many suspects, from Mulcahy’s family members to his business enemies, that the sleuths can only pray that following the money will lead to the killer.
The competent and exacting detective’s contacts and knowledge of Cork again help her solve a difficult mystery in fine fashion.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8758-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
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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