Woods (Reckless Abandon, 2004, etc.) writes with smooth confidence as famous names add spice to a diverting summer read that...
In Hollywood of 1939, a handsome young policeman makes good as a studio security officer, battling a sadistic mobster, finding love, and rubbing elbows with movie stars.
While patrolling the Sunset Strip late one evening, Beverly Hills cop Rick Barron happens upon the immediate aftermath of a bad two-car accident. He recognizes the barely injured occupant of one vehicle as highly intoxicated British matinee idol Clete Barrow. The quick-thinking Rick, at the instruction of Barrow’s handler Eddie Harris, whisks the movie star away from the scene, allowing the studio to spin its own version of the crash and Barrow to emerge unscathed. As a result, Rick lands a job as Barrow’s shadow, charged mainly with keeping the star sober and ready for his early morning calls. Other security odd jobs come Rick’s way. He becomes pals with Barrow, whose heavy drinking stems in part from concern over the nascent conflict in Europe and his desire to help the British war effort. Through Barrow, Rick meets Gable & Lombard, Garbo, Niven, and other luminaries, who make cameo appearances. Mystery swirls around Rick’s predecessor, John Kean. The distraught Kean allegedly shot his wife before turning his gun on himself. In Kean’s office safe, Rick finds incriminating photos of four people having kinky sex, the Keans and another unidentified couple, whom Rick meets shortly. The man is hotheaded soldier of Bugsy Siegal, Chick Stampano, in appearance a latter-day Valentino who likes to take out his anger on starlets. (Organized crime is moving into Hollywood in a big way; Lucky Luciano also has a foothold.) One of these starlets is the girl in the picture, Glenna Gleason, whom Rick woos by inches. Stampano becomes Rick’s nemesis, their confrontations progressively escalating until a final showdown becomes inevitable.
Woods (Reckless Abandon, 2004, etc.) writes with smooth confidence as famous names add spice to a diverting summer read that simmers but never gets hard-boiled.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15220-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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