Mystery & Suspense Archives | Page 85 of 119 | BookPage

by Barbara Clark

Portland, Maine, 1893: Police deputy Archie Lean is called on to view a crime scene—a mutilated body found in an abandoned building, with strange occult symbols drawn near the corpse. This is especially curious because the very same man had been shot dead and publicly buried two weeks earlier. Perplexed, Lean calls on private detective Perceval Grey, an associate from a previous case. Grey, a half-Abenaki Indian, possesses a sardonic wit and loner mentality that keep him at a remove from many others in the community. However, it’s clear that the two quick-witted and persistent detectives, together for their second sleuthing adventure (after The Truth of All Things), have formed a bond.

After studying the body and odd inscriptions, Lean and Grey are off and running. Solving the crime will take all of Grey’s Sherlockian instincts and Lean’s common sense, plus a lot of footwork back and forth between Portland and Boston, where the famous Boston Athenaeum holds a vital clue they must decipher.

A Study in Revenge offers two adventures in one, as Grey has recently responded to a dying man’s request to locate his missing granddaughter. The detective also gets embroiled in the search for a stolen artifact belonging to the man’s family, a so-called “thunderstone,” supposedly an ancient relic of great power. At this point in author Kieran Shields’s tale, we’re fair detectives ourselves if we’ve figured out how all these puzzle pieces will fall into place as the story develops.

The plot is awash in mysterious circumstances and suggestions of the occult. Looming large is the shadowy Jotham Marsh, a Moriarty-like figure who commands a mystical society called The Order of the Silver Lance—he’ll surely materialize again in future books. The story contains enough underground tunnels, rooftop chases, risings from the dead, treasure searches and strange decipherings to keep everyone busy, but despite all the activity, the story tends to bog down when pages of historical detail (from ancient Viking lore to descriptions of the geography of Boston) are inserted in the midst of the text. Readers determined to remain alert, however, will be rewarded with a rich and multi-layered adventure told with skill and attention to detail.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Thrilling conclusion to a landmark trilogy

Review by bookpagedev

by Bruce Tierney

The final volume of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, finds neo-punk and genius hacker Lisbeth Salander recuperating from a bullet to the brain. She’s in no hurry to get better: A multiple-murder trial awaits her recovery. She has wreaked vengeance on her tormentors, who conspired to imprison her for most of her teen years. A few are dead, and the rest are scurrying to cover their tracks and somehow neutralize her before she can incriminate them. So was it murder, or self-defense? Or is there just the slightest possibility that Salander is, if not entirely innocent, at least not guilty in the eyes of the law?

Helping Salander from outside is renegade journalist Mikael Blomkvist, at times the focus of Salander’s affections, and more recently the object of her unbridled loathing. Blomkvist isn’t exactly sure how he fell from her graces, and she has not been forthcoming with the answer; indeed, she rebuffs his every advance. And so this uneasy pair labors, sometimes at odds, sometimes in parallel, in pursuit of Salander’s freedom.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest neatly ties together all the loose ends from the previous two cliffhangers, yet it still leaves the reader yearning for more. At the time of his death, Larsson left behind an unfinished manuscript of what would have been the fourth book in the series, and synopses of the fifth and sixth. Sadly, we will probably never see them, at least not as the author intended.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Journey to a tomb in Cumbria

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Take a small town in Cumbria, England, in 1783. Add a few generations of witches, an island holding an ancient tomb, a long-dead body discovered in the wrong place, a kidnapping, a golden artifact encrusted with jewels—and murder. Then you have Island of Bones, Imogen Robertson’s wonderful third historical suspense novel that features the eccentric anatomist Gabriel Crowther and his friend and associate in detection, Harriet Westerman.

The reclusive Crowther is a dense and complicated character, vaguely Holmesian in his approach, with an exterior that’s hard for his acquaintances to penetrate. Westerman has her own legacy of guilt and sorrow, but she’s just about the only person who knows how to handle her compatriot. Together they form one of the most intriguing duos in contemporary detective fiction. Theirs is a bond formed through an equal fascination for the particulars of crime, a commitment to finding the truth of a matter and a habit of forthright speech.

Crowther and Westerman form one of the most intriguing duos in contemporary detective fiction.

In Island of Bones, readers will at last discover part of Crowther’s backstory, though his past continues to haunt him. Invited by his sister to investigate a body found in a tomb (where it didn’t belong) alongside its rightful occupant, Crowther and Westerman travel to Cumbria, where they revisit the old estate where Crowther was raised and from which he fled 30 years earlier hoping never to return. The two amateur detectives are soon caught up in a very current evil that reaches back to past treacheries, and one that, when revealed, must also serve to lay some of Crowther’s family ghosts to rest.

This atmospheric, beautifully structured novel contains a host of well-drawn characters, including Crowther’s temperamental sister and wayward nephew; Harriet’s son, Stephen; and two of the book’s most attractive characters: a wanderer named Casper and his talking jackdaw, Joe. The intricate plot, though occasionally confusing, is laced with historical fact, and a note at book’s end explains some of the English background underlying the story.

Readers who love 18th-cenutury British history will not go amiss with this novel—a great read for a snowy twilit afternoon.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

High stakes for P.I. McCone

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Marcia Muller’s writing instructor told her she didn’t have the goods to become a successful author, but in the early 1970s Muller tried her hand at mystery novels. The result, in 1977, was her first best-selling Sharon McCone mystery, Edwin of the Iron Shoes. Over the next 30 years, the award-winning author has penned 25 additional novels featuring P.I. McCone, each one an intriguing addition to the series.

McCone has come a long way, baby, since her start as a staff investigator with All Souls Legal Cooperative; now she’s the head of a San Francisco investigative agency. In Looking for Yesterday, McCone meets with Caro Warrick, a woman who’s been acquitted of killing her best friend, but who wants an in-depth investigation into the murder to uncover the real killer—thus truly exonerating herself in the public eye. The case has barely gotten started, however, when Warrick is murdered on McCone’s very doorstep.

The P.I. and her staff must pick up the pieces where there’s little to go on besides newspaper accounts of the trial. McCone collects a string of unconnected facts, searching for anyone with ties to Warrick: a sheep-grazing hermit; an old lover or two; some illegal arms smugglers; a reporter for a radical right-wing paper who’d trashed the victim during her trial; a string of dysfunctional family members . . . not to mention a body stuffed in a drainage pipe. The action ratchets up a notch when McCone finds herself in danger, crouched alone in a sabotaged elevator and, later, caught in a savage, devastating fire. Why are the stakes so high?

The story is laced with the interactions between McCone and her well-traveled husband, a high-flying international investigator, as well as her family and network of friends. Their lives are just a little too polished and prosperous, perhaps . . . it seemed a bit more real in McCone’s earlier days, without all the private jets, upscale (and numerous) homes, nifty outfits and easy money. But there’s a considerable upside as well. It’s a joy to read prose that slides like water over smooth stones, with nary a misstep or misplaced comma. Looking For Yesterday is an appealing read from a true professional.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

A secretary becomes a spy

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy is Susan Elia MacNeal’s tense second novel featuring MI5 secret agent Maggie Hope. In this installment, Maggie is sent for MI5 training to become a hands-on operative after leaving her job as a typist in Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime stable of aides.

After months in an intense program, Maggie wants be sent abroad for front-line intelligence gathering. Instead, her training and longtime expertise in mathematics lead her to a position as tutor to the 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth at Windsor Castle. However, Maggie’s real job entails keeping eyes and ears open undercover, alert to a possible Nazi plot against the Royal Family. With its stringent wartime atmosphere—and despite legions of Coldstream Guards marching about—the assignment at Windsor proves a dangerous one, with a passel of suspicious characters in residence at the castle. Maggie is able to make headway in unmasking a double agent while her math skills enable her to spot and decode some encrypted messages.

A snappy, addictive book set in wartime Britain.

The depiction of wartime Britain is fascinating, from the glimpse of a querulous Duke of Windsor sunning in Portugal, to the daily activities of the Royal Family, to a beetle-browed Winston Churchill planning espionage from his bath. Details like this give the story a romantic, as well as fact-based, flavor.

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy is a snappy, addictive book, although it lets down at the finale with a less-than-credible rescue mission and an unsurprising villain. Maggie’s turbulent relationship with her father—also an undercover agent—and her romantic entanglements form a crucial sub-plot, but “super spy” Maggie often appears to be a loose cannon in Britain’s network of experienced, hardworking intelligence officers when she’s unable to keep her personal life at bay.

A preview near the book’s end hints at a danger-filled drop behind enemy lines in Maggie’s next espionage adventure. We’ll be rooting for her to earn our confidence—and help the Allies win the war.

After…

Cozy Mystery, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery Cozy Mystery

Cat-aided sleuthing

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

In What the Cat Saw, multiple award-winning mystery writer Carolyn Hart has penned another can’t-put-down tale—the first in a series—and this one comes with a nice dash of romance.

Nela Farley has traveled out West to cat-sit—she’s filling in for her sister, Chloe, who was minding the cat upon the death of its owner, Marion Grant, one of her employers in the hotsy-totsy charitable Haklo Foundation in Craddock, Oklahoma. The plan is for Nela to perform Chloe’s secretarial duties at the foundation while the latter is sunning in Tahiti. She’s hot-footed it off with her boyfriend to the tropics, while Nela, still reeling from the death of her soldier fiancé, thinks a change of scene may be just the ticket.

The proverbial ticket, however, comes complete with an apartment break-in on the very first night of Nela’s arrival, and if that’s not enough, there’s Nela’s subsequent discovery of a glittering diamond and gold necklace in Marion Grant’s purse, left strangely untouched when the place was ransacked. To make matters even worse, are those the cat’s thoughts echoing around in Nela’s head? Jugs, the feline, appears to be communicating feelings of unease and dread that include the possibility that his former owner did not die accidentally.

To make matters even worse, are those the cat’s thoughts echoing around in Nela’s head?

The necklace and the circumstances surrounding Grant’s death form the backdrop for Nela’s first day at work. She learns of all the strange, angry occurrences that have occurred at the foundation over the past year, including the disappearance of—you guessed it—an heirloom diamond necklace belonging to the foundation’s trustee, Blythe Webster.

In practiced and satisfying fashion, Hart pulls in her readers, winding the threads of circumstance and drawing Nela in tighter and tighter as she gets to know the odd little group whose lives revolve around the foundation and whose lines of patience have been stretched with each small act of violence, culminating in another murder most foul.

Enter Steve Flynn, a rumpled, red-headed reporter for the Craddock Clarion. Steve’s eye for the truth, as well as his eye for Nela, enliven the activities, and after circling one another for a time, the two form a somewhat wary alliance to ferret out the culprit. This is a nicely fashioned whodunit guaranteed to keep readers’ interest right to the finish.

In What the Cat Saw, multiple award-winning mystery writer Carolyn Hart has penned another can’t-put-down tale—the first in a series—and this one comes with a nice dash of romance.

Nela Farley has traveled out West to cat-sit—she’s filling in for her sister, Chloe, who was minding…

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

Adventures of a Scottish philosopher

Review by bookpagedev

by Joanne Collings

I’ve been told all my life that I think too much, so I was delighted to make the acquaintance of Isabel Dalhousie, a 40-ish spinster, Edinburgh resident, editor of Review of Applied Ethics and the heroine of Alexander McCall Smith’s Sunday Philosophy Club series of novels. Isabel is, by profession and by personal inclination, a thinker. She thinks about everything, from the moral difficulties caused by chocolate, to economics, to age differences (the old have been young, but the young have not been old, so “[i]t was a bit like discussing a foreign country with somebody who has never been there”).

Isabel is easily drawn into others’ lives, including those of strangers. When she meets a recent heart transplant patient who tells her about the strange, life-threatening visions he’s been having, Isabel becomes involved, researching the theory of cellular memory and investigating the lives of those who might have been her new friend’s donor. Ever self-aware, Isabel recognizes that her motives are open to interpretation, acknowledging that “some would call it indecent curiosity. Even nosiness.” Isabel is appealing because she’s so human. She’s in love with Jamie, a musician younger than she who is still in love with Isabel’s niece Cat, who is no longer in love with him. Isabel’s only romance ended badly and she worries that “men don’t like women who think too much.” She’s well-off, but lonely, reflecting as she makes her way home from a concert that “nothing awaited her at home but the solace of the familiar.” McCall Smith is a lovely writer (the dead are described as being “like a cloud of love, against which weather we conduct our lives”) and, although his books are often called mysteries, readers not interested in that genre should still enjoy this novel. It’s a wonderful addition to the fall reading season.

I've been told all my life that I think too much, so I was delighted to make the acquaintance of Isabel Dalhousie, a 40-ish spinster, Edinburgh resident, editor of Review of Applied Ethics and the heroine of Alexander McCall Smith's Sunday Philosophy Club series of…

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

A whodunit for Jane Austen fans

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Every chapter of Tracy Kiely’s new mystery, Murder Most Austen, begins with a pithy quote from Jane herself, the undisputed mistress of early 19^th-century British literary fiction. For Austenites, this is cause for celebration. What’s more, the story is packed with Austen allusions, and Kiely’s narrative combines a well-constructed plot with a nice and easy sense of humor.

Kiely has fashioned a series with strong, admiring links to Austen the Original. In this installment, the series heroine, Elizabeth Parker, has traveled with her aunt Winnie to Bath, England, to attend that city’s annual Jane Austen Festival. As usual, where Elizabeth goes, along comes a murder or two. The Anglophile young woman soon finds out that real murder in present-day England is not quite the same as the cozy plots of a bygone Jane Marple day.

An egocentric English professor from America has promised to deliver a paper at the festival that will turn Austen fans on their ears with its supposed revelations about what “really” lies behind the author’s writings. Quite a few people are mightily upset by his claims, including Cora, an old friend of Aunt Winnie. Cora can’t seem to let the professor’s ridiculous propositions die a natural death, and she confronts him at every opportunity. Thus, when the professor dies a very unnatural death, suspicion immediately falls on Cora. Elizabeth is drawn into the fray in order to prove Cora’s innocence.

Tracy Kiely’s many fans will welcome another installment in a series that brings the brilliant Jane Austen to the forefront.

The strange assortment of possible suspects includes the dead man’s wife, ex-wife and a lover or two; an exasperating Brit named John Ragget, who insists on showing off his local knowledge to all and sundry; the professor’s square-jawed assistant; Cora’s seemingly naïve daughter; and the nasty professor’s equally nasty daughter-in-law.

Another murder ups the ante, but faithful readers will likely uncover the villain at about the same time as Elizabeth, who ends up confronting the real killer with—I might venture to say—a very unlikely final thrust. But then, this is fiction, and Kiely’s many fans will welcome another installment in a series that brings the brilliant Austen to the forefront.

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

The super-dog detective is back

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

As sole proprietors of the Little Detective Agency, canine detective Chet and his (human) friend Bernie are at it again in A Fistful of Collars. After the mayor of Bernie’s Southwest desert hometown (“the Valley”) successfully promotes the area as a location for the newest Thad Perry blockbuster film, the pair act as minders for the popular but problem-ridden actor. Turns out the oddly winsome Thad has a way-back connection to the Valley. No one in his entourage seems to want his past known . . . maybe badly enough to kill?

As in his four previous books, author Spencer Quinn features the indomitable Chet as narrator, and you’ll never have a dull moment as the cocky canine wags his way into your affections. The book is full of hilarious verbal fly-bys, and these Chet-isms are what give the books their inventive humor, as Chet alternately misses the point or gets it with bells on. He explains that an idea can slip right by him, a fact he quickly accepts: “My mind shrank away from the thought. Always a surprisingly nice feeling when my mind did that: I had one of those minds that was on my side, if you know what I mean, which I actually don’t.”

You’ll never have a dull moment as the cocky canine wags his way into your affections.

The quiet Bernie (one wishes he’d say more) is hopeless with expressing feelings, especially toward the opposite sex; and he’s a loser at finances. But as the brains behind the operation, he has a fine-tuned sense of what’s going on in people’s heads, exacting the crucial truth from troubled suspects. Chet contributes his superior doggie hearing and speed, and he has a wonderful sense of what’s buried inside the human heart, fueling those human needs that sometimes confuse him. Bernie puts ‘em on the spot, Chet gets ‘em by the collar.

This book contains some fascinating cameo roles: a smallish dog barking from the desert outside Bernie’s gate; a frightening killer dog named Outlaw; and Brando, a silky-smooth, golden-eyed cat who belongs to Thad. Chet’s full of surprises, and they frequently surprise him, too. We hope that Quinn (a k a well-known author Peter Abrahams) doesn’t tire of this, pardon me, arresting pair.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Mystery in Morocco

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Grab your geography book and ’fess up that you don’t really know that much about the British colony of Gibraltar, or about the current politics between “The Rock” and its contiguous country, Spain. But Thomas Mogford’s debut crime novel, Shadow of the Rock, sets us straight on all things Gibraltar as he introduces Spike Sanguinetti, a Gibraltarian tax attorney and amateur detective with a strong taste for finding out the truth of a matter.

The attorney’s story takes one exotic turn after another as he travels to the Moroccan city of Tangier, just nine miles away across the Strait of Gibraltar. He’s looking for answers—and a murderer—as his old friend Solomon Hassan sits in a Gibraltar jail, accused of cutting the throat of a Spanish woman, stepdaughter of one of his employers in Tangier. Hassan, presumed guilty, has escaped to Gibraltar, and the authorities in Tangier want him back to stand trial.

This tightly written, highly readable story needs no car chases or special effects to lure readers into an all-night read.

Spike seeks information in Tangier from Hassan’s employers at the mysterious but high-flying renewable energy company Dunetech, poised to extend its multi-national control with an enormous solar energy site under construction in the Sahara. The attorney sets out to untangle the web of deceit and corruption at the energy giant. He also traverses the bars and back alleys of the famous Moroccan city, and travels into the desert with a young Bedouin girl, where he encounters the gleaming solar array, not to mention the ancient Bedouin tradition of Bisha’a (a painful lie detection ritual)—to his extreme discomfort.

Mogford assigns a starring role to the politics and locations of this romantic and captivating region, where the exotic locales are the stuff of old Bogart movies. This tightly written, highly readable story needs no car chases or special effects to lure readers into an all-night read. There’s an appealing cast of characters: Dunetech high mucky-mucks Nadeer Ziyad and Ángel Castillo; robed and turbaned Bedouins; a corrupt Tangier bar owner; and Spike’s inventive hotel neighbor, Jean-Baptiste, with his exquisite knowledge of the highways and backways of Tangier. The intriguing chemistry between Spike and a police officer named Jessica will assure her return in upcoming sequels.

Spike will turn your head in this engrossing new series. Attractively, he seems to be free of the quick-comeback, wise-cracking demeanor that mars so many of today’s fast-track detectives. A follow-up novel, The Sign of the Cross, is in the works.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

A cheerleading nightmare

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Who knows better than “us girls” how cruel young women can be, especially to one another? Perhaps you remember, some years back, the mean and awful dealings amongst the ladies in books such as Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.

Megan Abbott’s heart-stopping new novel, Dare Me, ups the ante on girl competition and angst, dropping readers into today’s high school milieu, complete with deceit and bullying, dangerously updated in high-tech fashion. Written in insistent, startling prose, the tense narrative excels at dramatic imagery as we step into a world where at times we wish we could avert our eyes. The reckless plot never lets up and will get under your skin.

Dare Me introduces readers to a group of elite, varsity cheerleaders who don’t seem to have anything truly useful to do with their toned, bulemic bodies except continue to abuse them. The hard-driving squad has a new coach, and her arrival unseats Beth, a student, from the top of the control echelon. The other girls fall under the spell of the calm and perfectionist Coach Colette French, who’s poised to challenge the team to a whole new level of gymnastic excellence.

Poised on the edge of beauty and darkness, Dare Me is a book you won’t soon forget.

What happens when this teenage hierarchy is thrown into disarray, and control slips from one person to another? Mix drinking, drugging and dieting with the high-tech communication devices these teens can’t escape, and you get a volatile and claustrophobic mix where chips are indeed going to fall. In a tightly constructed series of ominous scenes, Abbott produces a dark story that culminates in a disaster readers knew would occur, as cell phones vibrate back and forth like cunning, insistent hearts.

And speaking of falling, what about the high-flying new 2-2-1 pyramid routine that Coach is training the girls for? Who will soar and who will fail? We’re left with the nagging, unanswered question of what exactly drives these young women, and what might give their lives a lighter hue. As it is, they badly want to be an organic part of their small, compact troupe. Coach urges them on: “A pyramid isn’t a stationary object. It’s a living thing. . . . The only moment it’s still is when you make it still, all your bodies one body, until … we blow it all apart.”

Poised on the edge of beauty and darkness, Dare Me is a book you won’t soon forget.

Megan Abbott’s heart-stopping new novel, Dare Me, ups…

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

A study in Victorian terror

Review by bookpagedev

by Tim Davis

Long Spoon Lane, Anne Perry’s latest addition to the excellent Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series, is a compelling tale of murder, terror and corruption in 1893 London. In the opening paragraphs, Thomas Pitt and Victor Narraway, both with the Special Branch for England’s homeland security, race across the city in response to a terrorist threat, hoping to thwart a bombing in the gritty East End. Arriving in time to witness, but too late to prevent the explosion and devastation, Pitt and Narraway pursue the suspects. The chase leads them to a tenement in dingy Long Spoon Lane where a gun battle ensues and two suspects are arrested. There is one dead suspect, however. Identified as Magnus Landsborough, he instantly becomes the most interesting piece of a complicated puzzle for Pitt and the Special Branch. Magnus Landsborough died because of an apparent gunshot to the head, but more significantly, he was the son of a respected Member of Parliament. Pitt immediately has several questions: why was Magnus, an ostensibly honorable young man with important social and political connections, involved in the murderous terrorist bombing? And, equally important, how and why did this young man really die? Eager to find answers to these and other questions, Pitt sets out on a harrowing adventure in which he must move with equal ease in tough, down-and-out neighborhoods and in high-society drawing rooms. Relying upon help from his wife Charlotte and a few dependable friends and colleagues, but also reluctantly allying himself with a personal enemy, Pitt despite dangers to himself and his family ultimately exposes terrifying truths about personal loyalties, family secrets, police integrity and Parliamentary politics. Perry fills her exciting novel with perfectly nuanced images of life in 1890s London, proving once again through her adroit blend of ingenious plotting, superb characterizations and compelling themes that she is a master of the Victorian crime novel.

Tim Davis teaches literature at the University of West Florida.

Long Spoon Lane, Anne Perry's latest addition to the excellent Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series, is a compelling tale of murder, terror and corruption in 1893 London. In the opening paragraphs, Thomas Pitt and Victor Narraway, both with the Special Branch for England's homeland…

Historical Fiction, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Historical Fiction

Jack Kennedy, spy

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Hitler has begun his march across Europe, and the United States and England are locked in denial. It’s 1939, just at the dawn of the intelligence era in U.S. politics. A 22-year-old Jack Kennedy, restless and very ill, is preparing to travel through Europe gathering research for his senior thesis. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of a minority of politicians who see the deadly war with Germany looming, enlists the young traveler to keep his eyes and ears open to discover the source of a fund of German money that’s entering the United States; Hitler’s trying to buy the American election, defeat FDR and seat an isolationist in the White House.

Like where this is going so far? That’s just the tip of the iceberg in the riveting Jack 1939, Francine Mathews’s latest spy thriller. Mathews, who’s had spy training and investigative experience as a CIA intelligence analyst, has effectively combined her knowledge of the politics and personalities of that era with a slam-bang plot of espionage and drama.

Francine Mathews has effectively combined her knowledge of the politics and personalities of 1939 with a slam-bang plot of espionage and drama.

The author creates a dramatic, unusual picture of young Jack, ill to near death with an as-yet unnamed disease that sends him to the Mayo Clinic and through the care of countless medicos. He’s intelligent, curious, irresistible to women, volatile and desperate—with “the fog called boredom or death hovering just over his left shoulder.” Riding on the Kennedy family reputation as pleasure-seeking social climbers, he’s able to close in on the seats of Nazi power without initially being counted a threat.

Filled with memorable characters both fictional and historical, Mathews provides an edge-of-the-seat journey, filled with haunting images that readers won’t soon forget. On the one hand, Jack must deal with his own father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., Ambassador to England and an ardent isolationist with tunnel vision. On the other, he must deal with “the Spider,” a Nazi thug intent on seeing Jack permanently among the missing. Mathews presents a rogue’s gallery of real historical figures, drawn with color and imagination, including the canny Roosevelt, a turtle-backed J. Edgar Hoover and the hard-drinking Winston Churchill, all poised at the brink of devastating war. The author draws on her knowledge of the Kennedys for an astonishing take on private scenes she imagines among them.

Aficionados of espionage fiction, history, the Kennedy family, World War II and seat-of-the-pants excitement will devour this book, a must-read story that stands out from the pack. It’ll make you want to turn back to your history books once again.