Month: May 2024

Powerful historical fiction

In The Goddess of Warsaw, New York Times bestselling author Lisa Barr tells the powerful story of fictional Hollywood icon Lena Browning, her — unknown to fans — life before/in the Warsaw Ghetto as Bina Blonski, her resistance missions as Irina Zieliński and her escape to America.

When we first meet Lena in the prologue set in 2005 Hollywood, it seems like an over-the-top portrayal of an octogenarian Golden Age actress, not realizing that Lena was playing a character – herself. It’s a well-honed craft she used to not only survive the horrors of Nazi terror over Jews in WWII-era Poland but to battle them, survive and exact revenge.

With master strokes, Barr paints a picture of guts, determination and an unwillingness to surrender amidst the despicable and heart-wrenching events going on all around Bina Blonski, whose blonde hair and blue eyes were key to her survival. With Nazis in Hollywood, Lena’s self-appointed missions to combat them continue.

Barr seamlessly weaves all of the threads of Lena Browning’s life together for an emotional climax and while the actress may have had a ‘no tears clause’ in her film contracts, they poured down my face.

I highly recommend The Goddess of Warsaw to readers of WWII-era historical fiction, thrillers and spy novels. I received an advanced reader copy of the novel from Harper Collins Publishers, courtesy of NetGalley.

Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Review by Di Prokop, More Mystery Please

Cryptic Phrase Sets Tone for Murder at Land’s End

Cornwall is one of my most favorite places on Earth, so I was thrilled to get the chance to read Murder at Land’s End by Sally Rigby.

In this the third book of the series, Detective Inspector Lauren Pengelly and Detective Sergeant Matt Price lead the investigation into the murder of a young woman, whose body was found on the rocks off the coast of Lands End, the western most point in Cornwall and the most southwesterly point on the British mainland.

As I hadn’t read the previous installments of the series, I was amused to read that Price, a young widower relatively new to the Penzance police station, has an aversion to dead bodies. I imagined it presenting itself much the way the blood aversion affects Doc Martin, in the series by the same name, set in Port Wenn (actually Port Isaac), also in Cornwall. However, his voice in my head sounded more like Ralf Little, who portrays DI Neville Parker in Death in Paradise.

The cryptic phrase, “Men must work and women must weep,” was found on a piece of paper in the victim’s mouth. While it took me only seconds with a Google search to learn that the phrase was taken from The Three Fishers, a poem by Charles Kingsley, Pengelly put a member of her team into investigating its meaning, making it seem a little unrealistic to me.

I enjoyed the premise, the setting and the characters but the story, however, didn’t quite hit the mark for me. Even with the discovery of a second body, more suspects, a tricky family crisis for Pengelly, the overdone narration and not enough of a twist at the end, left me feeling like there was something missing. I so wanted to love Murder at Land’s End.

I received this advanced reader copy of Murder at Land’s End from Storm Publishing, courtesy of NetGalley. Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Hats off to Hope

Hats off to The New York Times, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly and USA Today-bestselling author Susan Elia MacNeal for the outstanding finale to her phenomenal Maggie Hope mystery series with The Last Hope.

When I read the last page, my head was buzzing. I was dying to talk to someone else who read the 11th and final novel in the series, due out on May 21. How I wished I could talk about everything I loved about The Last Hope without loading this review with spoilers. I even fist bumped the air when I read a reference to my favorite minor supporting character, making sure she had survived the war thus far.

This installment comes full circle for Maggie from when we first met her in Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, the premiere book of the series, as a British-born, Boston-raised young mathematician, who after returning to London to sell her grandmother’s home lands a job working as a typist in the prime minister’s office in 1940. That’s where the adventures of one of my favorite heroine’s begin – second only to Nancy Drew.

With her courage, perseverance and keen intellect, readers have enjoyed seeing Maggie keep buggering on through tragedy, solving murders, foiling assassination attempts, and in her role as a special agent with the British Special Operations Executive (SEO), protecting princesses, coming to the aid of Eleanor Roosevelt, parachuting into Nazi-occupied territory, diffusing bombs, ferreting out a Nazi cell in Hollywood, all the while peeling back layers to family secrets that never seem to end.

While this final novel and the entire Maggie Hope/Mr. Churchill’s Secretary series is a work of fiction, its characters and situations were based on or inspired by real people and events. The Last Hope finds Maggie, having climbed the ranks to Major, in 1944 Spain and Portugal on a dual mission ordered by British intelligence officer Kim Philby, (whom we know today was a spy for the Soviet Union), to assassinate the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was instrumental in the Nazi nuclear program.

Maggie was also tasked to pass a letter from Coco Chanel, who saved her life in The Paris Spy, to Winston Churchill, as part of the perfumer/designer/Nazi spy’s mission from Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg to use her connections with Churchill to broker a separate peace between England and Germany.

Thank you Susan Elia MacNeal for giving us Maggie Hope, for all of your heart and research that has gone into The Last Hope and the entire series, whose topics could sometimes be rather heavy to write about. While I’m disappointed this is the last of the series, I still hold out hope that someday we’ll see Maggie again, perhaps with John as the Sterling Spies?

I’ve learned more about life in WWII Europe and the UK from this series than I ever did in school. As I’ve written in previous reviews, I believe MacNeal’s work should be required reading, not only to give context to the world we live in today but to more importantly show how unsung bravery can make all the difference.

Be sure to read the Historical Notes chapter at the end of the book for the incredible true details the author drew from for the book. Hats off indeed.

I highly recommend The Last Hope for fans of historical mysteries, suspense, female heroines and WWII era fiction. While I received this advanced reader copy of The Last Hope from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine – Bantam, courtesy of NetGalley, I’ve also pre-ordered my hard copy so that I can add it to my Maggie Hope collection.

Order online or buy now at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Sellers Books and Art in Jim Thorpe, PA.

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