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My friend of over three decades tried to comfort me and her soldier husband: three tours, two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, a navy-blue sweatshirt boasting an Airborne patch, a bracelet saying Remember The Fallen circling his wrist, a black, rubber ring dark on his calloused hand, the kind soldiers wear to honor others who’ve served or lost their lives in combat.
Soon after the translators convene in Irena Rey’s village on the outskirts of the Białowieża forest in eastern Poland, “Our Author” makes an initial, harrowing appearance (as she has done with her translators many times before). Then, quite inexplicably, she vanishes.
As with any novel steeped in noir, the narrator’s voice is everything. Does Jack’s voice, as shown here sounding somewhat detached from his surroundings, persuade us of the authenticity of his story? Yes, some of the time, while at other moments he comes across as much too naïve for this crooked line of work.
On the march, she’d seen the Slingerland family and the Van der Hurk family, but she didn’t know where they had ended up. The guard led Mary and her family to a small house with a yard and fence, then ushered them toward the house. One side of the yard was dug out for a garden, although it looked as if it had been trampled recently. The house was a decent size for a family home, but not for the masses of women and children crowding inside the camp.
In the days to come, Meredith bonds with her rescuer, Nina Willis, and a young Frenchman, Jean-Pierre. They enjoy drinking fine wine, sampling the best of French cuisine, and roaming the streets of the City of Light. Thrilled with these new friends, Meredith impulsively shares a sheaf of pages she’s written about the Rug and his violent behavior.
Michael Hanson, phone in hand, stood looking out the window of his second-story office on Montana and Twelfth Street in Santa Monica. It was an inexpensive suite on an expensive street—just one small room and a secretarial station—but it was a prestigious address and that was important to him. Diane, his secretary, went home early because of a childcare emergency. Ordinarily, Michael would have been annoyed, but somehow aiding Diane in her childcare efforts worked to assuage his considerable guilt regarding his daughter.
Klieg lights installed on the roof of the Foreign Ministry building—itself, a bleak ten-story monolith—beamed down on arriving guests. I fell in with a crowd of cigar-puffing apparatchiks and their brawny wives, all of us moving down a herringbone-parquet hallway into a stately ballroom. The mincing waiter led me to a table in the rear, far from the podium and head table, around which the evening’s festivities would revolve.
For one thing, there’s a lot of exposition in the opening pages. We learn about Eliza’s late husband, Peter, and how his violent death led her to work in a house of ill repute. We meet several of her clients, men from all walks of life in this frontier outpost. Later, Eliza and Jean undertake their own amateur scrutiny into the killings—aided by a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the investigatory techniques of C. Auguste Dupin, its legendary detective.