Tag:

Historical

Review

The White Lady

by Brian Kenney

Jacqueline Winspear, author of the hugely popular mystery Maisie Dobbbs series set in England during WWII, here moves into the post-war world with a new heroine. Elinor White has had a lifetime of espionage. Born in Brussels, daughters of a British mother and a Belgian father who died in the early years of the WWI, she and her older sister spent WWI in Brussels, working as trained spies, going so far as derailing German supply trains in the dead of night. By age 14, already an expert markswoman, Elinor moves with her family to England. But by the beginning of WWII, she’s back in the espionage game, although eventually a terrible injury behind enemy lines sends her back to England and a lengthy hospitalization. When the war finally ends, she moves to the country, promising to forget the past and live a life of monotony. But when the lives of a neighboring family are threatened—they too are seeking anonymity—Elinor becomes involved, facing the country’s largest crime family head on. Throughout, readers will sense that Elinor is keeping something from us, and when her secret is finally revealed it brings about a type of healing. As always, Winspear is brilliant at bringing us into the past and into the lives of women, so often left out of accounts of war efforts. Winspear fans will find much to enjoy here, as will other readers of historical fiction.

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Review

Killingly

by Brian Kenney

A haunting tale set in the rarefied world of Mount Holyoke college, the oldest of the Seven Sisters, and inspired by a true story. It’s 1897 and Bertha Mellish, a quiet and rather odd junior, has gone missing, last seen walking into the woods that surround the college. As days go by, her disappearance draws to campus her sister and father—an enfeebled minister from Killingly, Connecticut—the police, and a private investigator hired by the family. But the one person who likely knows what happened to Bertha is Agnes Sullivan, and she’s being incredibly circumspect. Agnes is poor and Irish, a promising scientist, and Bertha’s closest friend…or lover? At a time when women in an environment like Mount Holyoke could establish romantic relationships, and display affection, Agnes and Bertha were such a couple—in fact, they planned after graduation to live in a Boston Marriage, the name for two women who set up a household together. So why is Agnes so tight-lipped? Rape, incest, abortion, vivisection, and insanity swirl around the narrative, as does the imagining of the precarious lives of women, even when privileged. Beutner does a wonderful job of pulling the reader into this world then locking the door behind us, keeping us engaged until the very last page.

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Review

The Book Spy

by Henrietta Thornton

The walled-off feeling of loneliness in a crowd pervades the pages of Hlad’s piercing historical thriller. Based on a fascinating and little-known true story of World War II, the tale sees librarians from New York Public Library sent throughout Europe to gather materials published by axis powers, photograph it, and send it via microfilm (the thumb drive of its day) back to New York to aid in overthrowing Hitler. Our hero is Maria Alves, a Portuguese American who, due to her parents’ jobs as newspaper photographers, lived all over the world as a child and speaks six languages. Sent to a neutral—but still dangerous—Portugal to scour bookstores for war-relevant information, her cover is that she is working for the Library of Congress to gather materials that are in danger of being destroyed in the conflict. Under no circumstances is she to engage in spying, but that undertaking soon falls by the wayside as the extent of the horror in nearby occupied France becomes apparent. Also affected by the French occupation is Tiago Soares, a Lisbon bookseller whose Grand-père and Grand-mère in Bordeaux run an operation that smuggles Jews to Lisbon, where increasing crowds of penniless, paperless refugees await passage to the United States. Hlad’s immersive portrayal of wartime Lisbon and its inhabitants, of the loneliness caused by the terror that anybody at any time could be an informant, plus his captivating thriller/romance tale make this a must-read, especially for fans of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code.

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Review

Swann’s War

by Brian Kenney

We’re deep into the Second World War, and Archie Swann—the police officer on Fourth Cliff, a fishing island off the Massachusetts coast—is fighting in the Pacific theater. But his wife, Mary Beth, herself a cop trained by the Boston Police Department, has stepped into his position. While Archie was beloved, Mary Beth is loathed, largely because of her gender, and the easiest of tasks is a struggle. While the island has traditionally seen little crime—settling fights between drunk fishermen and resolving domestic disputes seemed to be the bulk of the work—things have changed under Mary Beth’s watch. The body of a soldier, who lived in a camp for Italian POWs on the island, is hauled up from the sea by fishermen, a murder that creates unrest among both islanders and prisoners. When that murder is followed by others, Mary Beth, whose supports are a doctor who is untrained as a coroner and a deputy who is intellectually disabled, turns to the only real help she can find: organized crime from the mainland. But the real story here is the internal one: Mary Beth’s loneliness, her longing for Archie, her need to always maintain a tough outer shell, her battle against feeling like a failure. Novels about women in the War have blossomed in the past few years, but few have the grittiness, honesty, and authenticity in emotion, language, and detail of Swann’s War.

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Review

Of Manners and Murder

by Henrietta Thornton

“The right choice can be made to seem impossible, especially for a woman on her own,” learns “spinster” Violet Manville during her work as Miss Hermione, agony aunt for A Woman’s Place magazine. The usual Miss Hermione is Violet’s actual aunt, Adelia Henrietta Georgina Tylney Manville. When the feisty lady sets off from England for the Continent with her gentleman friend, she reveals that she is the mysterious author of the popular column and helpfully sets the shocked Violet up with folders of advice that have labels such as “Comportment,” “Mourning,” and “Mothers in Law.” Violet makes the right choice for herself, breaking out of her life as the studious, ignored, half-sister of the beautiful, flighty Sephora, who has an inheritance, which for a woman in 1865 is everything. Being unmarriageable frees Violet from some of the social duties Sephora adores, allowing her to visit a young woman who wrote to Miss Hermione for help. But when Violet reaches Ivy Armstrong’s village, she finds a very different scene from what she expected, and a murder investigation is soon afoot. Further choices abound, with Hastings keeping her hero within the boundaries of what a Victorian lady can do, while showing what life is like within those strictures and what happens when a woman has her freedom of choice stolen. Readers will empathize with Violet and even with her sad, social-climbing sister, both of whom are doing their best with what life’s dished out. Funny at times, this series debut is also an adventurous and thoughtful look at a time when women’s lives were on the brink of change. And it’s a puzzling whodunit to boot.

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Review

Terra Nova

by Henrietta Thornton

The supposed hero of this book is Captain Edward Heywoud, a paragon of colonial manliness who “[trails] ambition and resolve.” For years, he’s climbed the world’s highest peaks, sometimes with his photographer wife, Viola Colfax. Now, in 1910, he and long-time climbing companion James Watts and several other hardy men and their sled dogs are tackling the ultimate challenge: to reach the South Pole. And not just make it there, but do so before a Norwegian expedition claims the glory for its king rather than England’s. In a parallel struggle is Viola, who also isn’t the book’s hero, fascinating though she is. She’s in love with Edward, although he disapproves of many of her activities and is fond of telling her what she will do, but she also loves the gentler James, and the two are having an affair. While the men are away—a voyage chronicled in gripping and often horrible detail by author Lazaridis—Viola takes on the challenge of documenting the suffragette movement, a project interrupted when the men return and their photographs lead her to think their triumph is a fraud. As to the hero here, it’s not a particular person but the bodies described in this gorgeous and devastating work: James’s and Edward’s in Antarctica as they compare the calories they use against the remaining food and end up eating their dogs; the hunger-striking suffragettes, whose emaciated, police-battered bodies feature in a fascinating project by Viola; the steadfast figure of Mary, Edward and Viola’s maid, who indirectly makes the expeditions possible but is taken for granted by the family; and the body of the Earth, which tries to kill the men even as it enables their fame. The frustrating, brilliant Viola is one of my favorite characters, and this book one of my favorite reads, in a long time.

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Review

Death at the Savoy

by Brian Kenney

We’re in the mad, mod, mini-skirted world of London, 1968—the height of the swinging sixties. Where better to catch all the action than from a perch at the world-famous Savoy Hotel? Nowhere, unless you are young Priscilla Tempest, head of the Savoy’s press office, and arrive at work only to discover that your date from the previous night—Mr. Room 705—has been found quite dead. Odd, since when you left him he was a little too alive. Plus, it turns out that he’s a bit of an arms dealer, and not the caviar dealer he claimed. So begins Prudence’s crusade to clear her name, if not her reputation, keep her job, and maybe even stay alive. This book is outrageously funny, peppered throughout with all-too-realistic cameo appearances from the likes of Noël Coward, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and even a member of the royal family. Add to the mix a Soviet spy, a louche but handsome reporter, a fanatical monarchist from Scotland Yard, a Spanish gigolo, and serve it all accompanied by a nice flute of Bucks Fizz—that’s what the British call a Mimosa. And who said you don’t learn from fiction? Anglophiles, lovers of comic crime fiction, and anyone in need of a break from the present day will adore this book. I’m off to The Carlyle for a Fizz myself, don’t bother ringing until Book 2 is out.

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Review

The Poison Machine

by Henrietta Thornton

When Lloyd first introduced Harry Hunt in The Bloodless Boy (a firstClue starred review and a New York Times “Best New Historical Novel of 2021”), the 17th-century physicist was Robert Hooke’s assistant and the investigator of the gruesome murders of London boys. Here Hunt’s fortunes are doing both worse and better. On the glum side, we see his humiliating failure to replace Hooke as Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, with Lloyd’s almost-tactile picture of academic politicking giving the book a strangely modern feel. Hunt still finds prestigious work though: when the skeleton of a dwarf is found, Queen Catherine requests Hunt as investigator. Captain Jeffrey Hudson was “her” dwarf, and Hunt is tasked with finding out both who killed him and who the still-living man is who claims to be Hudson but is taller. The physicist’s urgent work this time (“the body will not keepe”) takes him far from the Thames shores he clung to in The Bloodless Boy. France is a major setting in the book and a final lengthy and very exciting scene takes us to the Queen’s Catholic Consult, where restrictions against the much-loathed group will be discussed. Lloyd again succeeds in creating an immersive look at the various layers of life his hero encounters, one that draws enough on real events to treat readers to intriguing history, but that also adds just the right fictional elements to keep the plot rich. Another winner

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Review

Mastering the Art of French Murder

by Brian Kenney

Cambridge’s newest series has everything going for it. A magical setting: Paris awakening after World War II, with its fabled lights returning and food overflowing in the marketplaces. A great lead: sophisticated Tabitha Knight, who’s abandoned Detroit, and a dull fiancé, to live with her older French uncle and his longtime partner. Plus some star power: Tabitha’s buddy and neighbor, the young Julia Child, a student at Le Cordon Bleu who can always be found in her kitchen, stuffing some poor bird. Cambridge does a brilliant job capturing Julia with her quirky diction, fluty enunciation, and joie de vivre. But some of that joie flies out the window when a young woman is found dead in Julia’s basement; the murder weapon is a knife from Julia’s kitchen; and a note, in Tabitha’s handwriting, is found on the woman’s person. Tabitha—every bit the modern, independent woman—heads off to track down leads, break into the victim’s apartment, and befriend an American theater group, all the while drawing the ire—and maybe admiration?—of the taciturn, but so very handsome, Inspector Merveille. A first-rate traditional mystery with strong characterization that is certain to appeal to a broad readership, especially fans of Jacqueline Winspear, Rhys Bowen, and Cambridge’s own Phyllida Bright series.

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Review

An Affair of Spies

by Henrietta Thornton

It’s 1943, and U.S. Army Sergeant Nathan Silverman is preparing to head back to Germany, his homeland, to fight the Nazis and, he hopes, find his close-knit Jewish family still alive. He’s one of the “Ritchie Boys,” members of a real WWII army unit made up of Germans and Austrians who were trained in intelligence and sent back to Europe as spies. But his days at Camp Ritchie are interrupted when Uncle Sam orders him to New York City to prepare for a different mission. Nathan has a valuable connection: his father is a physicist with the Nazi equivalent of the Manhattan Project, and the allies can use Nathan to find out how close Germany is to building a nuclear bomb. One problem: Nathan knows little about physics, but the army has taken care of this. His partner on the trip will be an American physicist, Dr. Fisher, whom Nathan is surprised to find is a young woman rather than the aging male academic he expected. The setup is absorbing on its own, with Balson (winner of the National Jewish Book Award for The Girl from Berlin) providing actual details about the race on both sides of the Atlantic to make a devastating weapon. Once the pair heads off, the action doesn’t disappoint either, at one point involving the most audacious plan imaginable to trick the enemy. There are sad moments and romantic ones here, but overall this is one nailbiting espionage scene after another, and perfect for fans of the large World War II spy genre.

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