Baffling circumstances combine with life-changing adventures in this breathtaking page-turner.
Florio kicks off a new series starring a Denver woman whose life is in shambles.
After her husband, Joe, convinced her to start a new chapter in their lives, 50-year-old Nora Best planned to write a book about their carefully plotted trip in an Airstream trailer. But when she catches Joe having sex with his best friend’s wife during their bon voyage party, Nora takes off alone with the rig even though she'd never driven it before. She stops at a National Forest campground near Blackbird, Wyoming, where attractive campground hosts Miranda and Brad greet her warmly and invite her for dinner. The next morning Miranda awakens Nora with the news that Brad got up during the night and may have been taken by a bear. Sheriff Duncan is hostile and suspicious of Nora; park ranger Caleb Dexter is more concerned about the bear. Although Joe shows up wanting her back, he’ll have to wait in line, because she’s arrested after Brad’s shirt is found in her camper. Out on bail, she’s attacked in the night by a man who slashes her, strips her, rubs her with bacon grease and pushes her off a cliff. Climbing back onto the trail, she’s rescued by Forever, a hiker she met at the campground who carries all her earthly possessions in her backpack. Since the sheriff is still convinced Nora killed Brad, only her poor physical condition keeps her out of jail. In a world in which nothing is what it seems, Caleb’s the only person she can trust.
Baffling circumstances combine with life-changing adventures in this breathtaking page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9024-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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