Fiction Review

Who can resist the idea of Paris—at any season? Not Molly Murphy, now a young mother.

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When her marital home in the Village is bombed—perhaps in retaliation against her husband, the NYPD stalwart—also their lives now possibly at risk—Daniel urges Molly to accept their neighbors/friends’ Gus and Sid’s invitation to join their Paris break in their Montmartre piedà-terre (French for what is usually a modest city apartment).

Molly and baby experience rough seas on the ocean liner but eventually train to Paris. When they reach the pied-à-terre, it’s empty. The landlady is not helpful, there’s no word for Molly. As Impressionism gives way to Fauvism and Cubism, and the Dreyfus affair rocks France, Molly juggles child-care with hunting her friends in an unfamiliar city.

Inevitably, she comes across a body…

Meet a young Isaac Bell. “With his combination of mental and physical prowess, Isaac Bell could easily become a sort of superhero (imagine a blending of Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage), but the authors do a nice job of keeping him from crossing that line.”—
Booklist.

It is 1920, and both Prohibition and bootlegging are in full swing. When Isaac Bell’s boss and lifelong friend Joseph Van Dorn is shot and nearly killed leading the high-speed chase of a rum-running vessel, Bell swears to him that he will hunt down the lawbreakers, but he doesn’t know what he is getting into. When a witness to Van Dorn’s shooting is executed in a ruthlessly efficient manner invented by the Russian secret police, it becomes clear that these are no ordinary criminals. Bell is up against a team of Bolshevik assassins and saboteurs. Cussler and Scott have written another wonderful page-turner…. This is historical action-adventure fiction at its rip-roaring best!”—
Library Journal Starred Review.

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