A gastronomically descriptive but unevenly executed work of crime fiction.
What starts as an innocent tour of Italy turns into a dramatic dash to save a family in Smith’s novel.
By the early 2000s, the Italian American Calsase family is two generations removed from their European roots, so they make travel plans to go across the sea to visit distant relatives. The two brothers of the family—Frank, a U.S. Marine captain suffering from PTSD, and Roger, an artist who’s down on his luck—are both moving on from failed relationships. In Italy, the story begins with a once-powerful Mafia family in a weakened state. Unbeknownst to the Americans, they’ve had to deal with a spate of arrests and a vendetta murder, which have left the family’s new leader, Luigi, desperate to show his family’s strength but also to keep them safe. He hatches a plan to quickly marry off Cecelia, his daughter—who’s grieving her recently killed childhood friend Davide—and Angelica, his feisty niece, to the American brothers. The plan sets in motion a dramatic series of events that imperil the lives of everyone involved. Over the course of this novel, Smith presents realistic settings by offering painstaking details of local food, both in Louisiana and in Italy; for example, he pays considerable attention to the preparation of wild game for the wedding feast. What’s unrealistic is how the story hinges on the unlikely arranged marriages, which is especially distracting in a story set in the early 2000s. The treatment of the novel’s female characters is also problematic; for example, when one of the brothers asks Luigi which woman is his intended, Luigi answers, “No difference. Choose!” and nobody seems bothered by this. Some pains are taken to present Angelica as independent and career-minded, but they’re undermined by constant references to her sex drive. Another distracting choice is the unconventional use of footnotes, which insert the author into the story, explain his writing choices, and promote his other works.
A gastronomically descriptive but unevenly executed work of crime fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1956161267
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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