A riveting look at the Indian boarding school system whose horrors continue to be uncovered today.
Georgia O’Keeffe takes on Nazis and the Catholic Church.
In 1936, isolationism is sweeping the U.S., and people like the fanatical priest Father Charles Coughlin are praising the Nazis and spewing hatred. Georgia’s settled at the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, far from her cheating husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and enjoying her relationship with Santa Fe Sheriff Ryan McCaffrey, who’s worried about Nazi espionage and Opus Dei, the archconservative offshoot of the Catholic church that’s giving his friend Bishop Claudio Peterson sleepless nights. During a painting trip, Georgia discovers Joseph, a frightened boy, hiding in a culvert. She brings him to her home and feeds him. He eventually reveals that he’s half Navajo and half Tarahumara, and that he was planning to run all the way to Mexico, but he ends up staying with her for several days and devouring her books. When Georgia goes to Santa Fe to see the bishop about creating a mural, she finds him hanging from a rope in the garden. Was his death suicide or murder? There are indications that he was strangled with a spiked cilice of the type that some church members use on themselves for self-mortification. Upon her return home, Joseph has vanished, leaving behind a note. Going after him, she learns that the priests and nuns who run the St. Ignatius School, where he had been sent by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, killed his sister and physically and sexually abused the children under their care. Georgia takes the opportunity to teach art at the school in order to uncover more murder and abuse. Ryan, who’s gone east to learn more about Nazi plots, returns to help Joseph uncover the grave of his sister. Everything comes to a head in a snowstorm that puts everyone in danger before good triumphs over evil.
A riveting look at the Indian boarding school system whose horrors continue to be uncovered today.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781448313860
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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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