Fans of historical fiction will love this one.
A young man sets out on a perilous expedition for the Republic of Texas.
In 1841 Louisiana, surveyor Alexandre LaBranche errantly draws a boundary line that puts many of his father’s slaves on his neighbor’s plantation. Oops! His fed-up father tells him he’s worthless and disowns him. Alexandre leaves home and is introduced to Texian president Mirabeau Lamar. (They weren’t called Texans until statehood.) Having confirmed that the youth can determine latitude and longitude, Lamar offers him $10,000 to map the Texas border up to the source of the Rio Grande, also secretly hoping he’ll find the 300 lost soldiers Lamar had sent to Santa Fe. Off the lad goes in a wagon, but soon two thieves rob him and toss him into a bramble-filled ditch. A free Black woman named Noeme eventually rescues him. She works for Sam Houston, who later succeeds Lamar as president. Various characters disparage Alexandre’s surveying skills and consider him a “plantation dandy” who can measure the Earth by looking at the sun and stars but can’t use a compass. He is a terrific mapmaker, though. His maps show every last building, Mexican soldier, and tortilla press along the Rio Grande in lifelike detail and perspective. The contrast between Alexandre’s professional skills and shortcomings strain believability: “You learned geography…but you didn’t learn which way the wind blows,” Houston tells him. Houston falsely accuses Alexandre of a murder and gives him the choice of either hanging in a gallows or spying on Mexico. The desire to prove himself, make money, and avoid execution all give plenty of motivation to forge ahead. The underlying events in this engaging novel are true. Before statehood, Texas was “the most ill-defended and beleaguered republic in North America” with undefined borders and constant attacks on Anglo settlements like San Antonio. There was indeed a massacre at Hacienda Salado where the 17 prisoners who drew black beans from a jar were executed by a firing squad. There are nice twists, enjoyable main characters, and rich local color. But will Alexandre achieve his goals?
Fans of historical fiction will love this one.Pub Date: March 2, 2025
ISBN: 9798990128965
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Stoney Creek Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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