Book Talk

Darkness and Danger

Having just finished The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, a novel which begins in Paris at the start of World War II, my mind is full of Nazis, deportations, Russian invasions, bombings, starvation and human resilience.

Released this month is A Train in Winter: an Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France, by Caroline Moorehead. French women from all walks of life quietly fought against the Nazis by distributing leaflets, hiding resisters, transporting weapons, passing messages and transporting Jews to safety. Two hundred thirty women were imprisoned by the Gestapo in Paris and later transported to Auschwitz. Only forty-nine returned to Paris.

Handsome, charismatic, Dr. Marcel Petiot, was known as “The People’s Doctor” for the many acts of charity he performed. He was also charged with the murders of at least twenty-seven, and possibly one hundred fifty people. Set against the background of Nazi-occupied Paris, the political turmoil of the times made the investigation and prosecution of the murderer almost impossible. David King has written Death in the City of Light: the Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris.

Published in 1986 by Art Spiegelman, Maus: a Survivor’s Tale, became the only comic book to win the Pulitzer Prize. The son of Holocaust survivors, he chose to tell his father’s story with the Jews as mice and the Nazis, cats. Now, in Meta Maus, he talks about the artistic and editorial decisions he made during its creation.

Fiction

Scandinavia mysteries are wildly popular (think Girl with a Dragon Tattoo), and an intriguing new one has arrived. The Boy in the Suitcase is written by Danish authors Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis. Nina Borg, nurse, wife and mother is a do-gooder. When her ex-friend, Karin gives her a key to a train station locker, Nina opens it. Inside is a suitcase, and inside the suitcase is a three year old boy; drugged but alive. Child trafficking? Abuse? Only when Karin is found murdered does Nina realize the jeopardy she is in.

Margaret Maron’s Deborah Knott and husband Dwight Bryant are off to New York City for a delayed honeymoon in Three-Day Town. Deborah has been asked by a neighbor in North Carolina to deliver a package to her granddaughter, Sigrid Harald of the NYPD. When Sigrid comes to pick it up, the package is missing and the building super has been murdered. The three must team up to find the murderer.

The underworld and the occult had free reign in 19th century Europe. Secret societies and convoluted plots were everywhere. Every country has a secret services both creating and seeking the rumored conspiracies. But what if the source of all the rumors and plots was one evil man; a man who created the worlds’ most notorious document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?  Umberto Eco, master of literary suspense, has written The Prague Cemetery.

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian