Where Memories Lie
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Gemma, Duncan, and the boys are back in their Notting Hill house and enjoying a quiet spring in London when Gemma receives a plea for help from her friend and neighbor, Erika Rosenthal.
Erika has never shared much of her past, other than telling Gemma that she and her husband came to London before the war as refugees from the emerging Nazi regime in Germany. Her husband was a historian and was found murdered in a local park. His death was never solved. Now Erika tells Gemma that a necklace from her past has come up for auction - a necklace which was taken from her. Now Erika asks Gemma to find out where the necklace came from.
As Gemma works backwards, interviewing the staff at the auction house and looking into the records of David Rosenthal's death, her viewpoint is interwoven with Erika's vivid memories of her life as a young woman in London during and after the war. Then a young woman at the auction house is murdered and suddenly the case becomes very much centred in the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When a diamond brooch stolen decades ago turns up for sale at an upscale London auction house, the brooch's owner, Dr. Erika Rosenthal, a retired academic who escaped Nazi Germany with her philosopher husband, David, during WWII, turns for help to her friend Insp. Gemma James in Crombie's lively 12th mystery to feature Gemma and Scotland Yard's Duncan Kincaid (after 2007's Water Like a Stone). The suspicious hit-and-run death of Kristin Cahill, a young clerk involved in the brooch's sale, is but the first in a series of fatalities to befall people connected to the auction. Crombie raises the suspense by alternating the contemporary story, which includes news of Gemma's mother's battle against cancer, with flashbacks to the investigation of David's unsolved murder in 1952 while he was working on an expos about Nazi sympathizers. With its echoes of Elizabeth George and even Danielle Steel, this entry will appeal as much to newcomers as to series fans. 7-city author tour.