Smart and stylish: Bring on the sequel.
Who killed the English lord? Raybourn’s debut is a lighthearted pastiche of a Victorian murder mystery.
That dying figure writhing on the floor of his London home is Sir Edward Grey, husband of narrator and heroine Lady Julia. Forgive her composure: It has been a disappointing marriage (no children, separate bedrooms), and for Julia, still in her 20s, it is time to move on. Her husband’s weak heart must have given out, she concludes, dismissing the suggestion of a mysterious stranger that it may have been murder. But a year later, in 1887, Julia discovers a threatening message and becomes hell-bent on tracking down the killer. For this she needs the help of that stranger: Nicholas Brisbane, a private investigator hired by Sir Edward before his death. Unlike the effete knight, Brisbane is “dark and masterful,” the kind of man Julia daydreamed about as a young girl; he also has more secrets than a cat has lives. His prickly relationship with Julia, crackling with sexual tension, drives the story as much as the investigation. No bodices get ripped, but there is one furious clinch. It appears likely that Sir Edward was poisoned, and missing pages from Julia’s Psalter, used in those threatening messages, point to an inside job. This makes for good entertainment, since Julia presides over an eccentric household that includes a Gypsy laundress, an Italian butler who was once an acrobat, a gardener who does his best work when drunk and (a recent addition) a talking raven stolen from the Tower of London. There are plenty of shocking revelations—visits to brothels, syphilitic infections, homosexual liaisons and grave-robbing—yet Raybourn keeps the tone light, displaying a gift for badinage. A far-fetched climax unmasking the killer is the sole disappointment. The state of play between Julia and Brisbane remains uncertain, perhaps to be resolved in another novel.
Smart and stylish: Bring on the sequel.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7783-2410-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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