A fast-paced, richly imagined, gritty tale of modern-day good versus evil.
This sequel focuses on a hapless civilian caught up in a paranormal agency.
James’ first Hourglass novel introduced readers to ordinary guy and aspiring comic book artist Clyde Williams and his friend Kevin Carpenter. The two hang out regularly despite Kev being dead. The fact that the pals commune so easily brings them to the attention of the clandestine paranormal agency known as Hourglass. They’re both brought onboard as operatives, working alongside agents both lethally trained and superpowered. This new installment of their adventures features the same fevered pitch of pulp prose that made the first book so enjoyable: “A few cautious steps later and Clyde understood why the hub guards were so utterly oblivious to the two intruders marching down on them. They were not bored. They were dead. Grey skinned and white-eyed, blood still dripping from the puddles in their seats.” Robert E. Howard fans will recognize the tone instantly. Like James’ series opener, the sequel centers on the secret war Hourglass is waging against the evil Cairnwood Society, Citadel Security Solutions, and CSS’s dapper, diabolical middle manager, Edward Talbot. Added to the mix is the requisite fantasy “Master,” an evil, nonhuman entity named Charon, and its machinations further complicate an already very pleasingly complex plot. The baleful Eye of Charon lurks in the background of the tale’s expanded action, watching over plot threads and characters (the most memorable of whom eerily earns her name “Doll Face”) that range far afield from Clyde and Kev.
The sheer zest of the storytelling here is infectious. James has mastered the knack of meshing the fast-paced lingo of paramilitary thrillers with the colorful worldbuilding of urban fantasy. It’s the same combination found in books like Larry Correia’s popular Monster Hunter series and the novels of Simon Green, and it works to extremely readable effect in these pages as Clyde, Kev, and their Hourglass allies continue to face off against Cairnwood and its minions. This is the kind of SF/fantasy where internet encryptions and Glock 19s show up right alongside hexes and undead monsters (sometimes merging, as in “low-grade demonic radiation” and the like). Virtually all of the players in some way live on the borderline between those two realities. “Being a practical man, one of sound reasoning, science, and logic,” one such character thinks while standing in the middle of a literally haunted dungeon, he “never used to believe in fluffy matters such as souls and dark forces, but now, every time he shivered down in this dank hellhole he couldn’t help but wonder if it was the cause of ghosts brushing his shoulder.” This and similar passages highlight the volume’s only recurrent flaw: the author’s tendency to get tangled up in his own verbiage. But this defect is minor compared to the story’s many strengths: the sharply drawn characters, the frequency with which the jokes land, and, most of all, the roller-coaster pacing, which keeps the whole supernatural business hurtling to a gripping conclusion. Fans of urban fantasy should jump on this series at its beginning.
A fast-paced, richly imagined, gritty tale of modern-day good versus evil.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-4107-3486-8
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
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