An enjoyable ensemble cast skillfully beefs up an uncomplicated crime plot; a quick, fun read with unsavory secondary...
In this third volume of a mystery series, Eleanor and President Franklin D. Roosevelt vacation at a therapeutic retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia.
In Durham and Smith’s (The President’s Birthday Ball Affair, 2018, etc.) latest installment, it is July 1935. A black woman named Nell Gaines is locked up in Milledgeville’s state prison farm for having attacked her abusive husband with a knife. Her fate is about to change because Wilton Biggs, a prominent white citizen of Greenville, Georgia, needs a cook. In exchange for an envelope of cash, the warden grants Nell parole and hands her over to Biggs. Cooking is not the only thing Biggs wants from Nell. Months later, disaster strikes when Biggs’ 17-year-old son, Robert, finds his father in bed with Nell. Enraged, Robert grabs a machete and swings wildly. Biggs is killed; Robert runs away; and Nell is arrested and convicted of murder. She is sentenced to death. Enter Mrs. Roosevelt. In May 1936, the Roosevelts, accompanied by the president’s private secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, arrive at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs. The first lady reads about Nell’s plight in the local paper and decides she must visit the prison herself and see whether the convict has been treated fairly. Meanwhile, aggressive Hollywood reporter Joan Roswell coincidentally finds herself visiting Warm Springs at the invitation of young movie star Ida Lupino. The series-defining Hollywood-Washington connection is now established. Add in Missy’s assistant Grace Tully and handsome FBI agent Corey Wainwright and the whole gang is back together, taking readers on another vivid and engaging visit to the 1930s, this time focusing on the Jim Crow South. Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell provides the episode’s celebrity cameo appearance. Although readers know the identity of the murderer, the race to save Nell from the electric chair supplies enough tension to propel the fast-paced narrative forward. Despite the underlying seriousness in theme, the breezy prose is filled with humorous interludes, and the portrait of an indefatigable and earnest Mrs. Roosevelt is delightful.
An enjoyable ensemble cast skillfully beefs up an uncomplicated crime plot; a quick, fun read with unsavory secondary characters and salient historical tidbits.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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