Appealing mainly for well-rounded characters, not plot.
In Perry’s latest Daniel Pitt mystery, the young barrister and his friends grapple with a serial killer terrorizing London.
It’s a cold, wet February in 1912 London, and the forecast calls for murder. A thorny assault case has landed on Daniel’s desk, and the second casualty of the so-called Rainy-day Slasher is now in the morgue being examined by Daniel’s friend Dr. Miriam fford Croft, a newly minted pathologist. Lena Madden, the second victim, like the first, Sandrine Bernard, was in her 20s. Like Sandrine, Lena was viciously stabbed, and part of her index finger on her dominant hand was severed. Soon, a third body, that of middle-aged banker Roger Haviland, is found, similarly mutilated. All the crimes occurred during blinding rain, in late afternoon or evening darkness. The police, spearheaded by Daniel’s fellow Cambridge alum Inspector Ian Frobisher, focus their investigation on what, if anything, connected the three in life. Much prevarication ensues as Frobisher and his ad hoc team of Miriam; her boss, Dr. Evelyn Hall; and Daniel mull over whether or not the murders could have been random, committed by more than one person, copycat crimes, etc. The only commonality that emerges, in an information deficit seemingly intended to enhance suspense, is that each victim had been, at one time or another, a Cambridge student. Two were acquainted with suburban vicar Richard Rhodes and his wife, Polly, who also have Cambridge ties. An apparent red herring is Daniel’s new case defending Cambridge history professor Nicholas Wolford, who, in a scuffle over a groundless accusation of plagiarism, broke his accuser’s nose and jaw. Much backstory about Miriam’s and Dr. Eve’s struggles to succeed in a field closed to women, and many interviews among and between the above characters, warmed by those English creature comforts of tea, shortbread, and coal fires, drain tension from the story until the hurried and minimally foreshadowed close.
Appealing mainly for well-rounded characters, not plot.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35873-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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