A cautionary tale that argues powerfully against handgonnes and their modern descendants.
Second installment in Holsinger’s series starring medieval detective John Gower.
While investigating a grisly mass murder—the bodies of 16 men were dumped in a London sewer—Gower makes the startling discovery that all were, apparently, killed by a recent innovation: a rudimentary rifle known as a “handgonne.” As in the previous volume (A Burnable Book, 2014), the narration occasionally shifts away from Gower to the voices of others whose connections to the central mystery emerge in increments. Stephen Marsh, a blacksmith whose error in tipping a cauldron of molten metal caused his master’s death, has been sentenced to 10 years’ indenture to the master’s widow, Hawisia. Marsh’s skills have attracted the attention of Snell, chief armorer to King Richard. Soon Marsh is crafting handgonnes at night, without Hawisia’s knowledge, or so he thinks. Robert and Margery, disguised as pilgrims, are on the road north, having broken out of jail. (She’s wanted for killing her brutal husband and he for poaching the king’s game.) They may have escaped just in time to avoid the fate of the sewer-bound 16. After happening on a forest splintered by shot, Gower and his best friend, Chaucer, are briefly detained by the Duke of Gloucester. Another massacre occurs: a surprise attack on a busy Calais market with handgonnes—a more unwieldy variant that requires two men to shoot. The killers wear armbands of cloth bearing Gloucester’s heraldry of intertwined swans; similar badges were found on 10 of the London victims. To employ parlance never stooped to by Holsinger, is someone trying to frame Gloucester? One of the chief delights here is the language, which convincingly mimics Chaucerian speech. Exhaustive detail on London infrastructure and the newly forged handgun industry can sometimes stultify compared to the vivid scenes of daily life circa 1386: the endless bribery required to get anything done, the struggles of women high and low, even Gower’s losing battle with what appears to be encroaching macular degeneration.
A cautionary tale that argues powerfully against handgonnes and their modern descendants.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-235645-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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
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
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