Turncoat: Aaron Elkins

I have a shelf of books that I call the "three year" shelf. A book can sit on the shelf for three years and if I don't read it before then it goes (to the donation stack). I figure that for most of the books, I can give them the 50 page test before deciding to continue reading them or giving up on them. And in a few cases it has only taken a page or three to realize that I can pass the book on to someone else. This has been moderately successful.

Turncoat by Aaron Elkins was on this shelf, but as soon as I read a couple of pages from the book, I knew I was going to keep reading.  The story, the premise, and the writing grabbed me immediately. It is set in November 1963 and begins on the day John F. Kennedy died.

The book begins with this sentence:

"For everybody else in America it was the day JFK was killed in Dallas. For me it would always be the day Lily's father turned up on our doorstep."

The narrator is Peter Simon, currently a professor of history at Brooklyn college, formerly a waist gunner in a B-17 towards the end of World War II. Lily is his wife of 17 years, a counselor in a local high school. The unusual thing about his father-in-law turning up on his doorstep is that Peter had always thought that he had died during the war. Thus, Lily's father's sudden appearance and her refusal to talk to her father confuses him. Days later her father is dead, his savagely beaten body found in southern Brooklyn.

Both Peter and Lily have roots in France. Peter was born there but moved to the US at a young age with his parents. Lily lived in France until 1945, when she was 17 and met Peter in London towards the end of the war. They married and moved to the US. So when Lily disappears after the discovery of her father's body, Peter starts the search for her in Europe, first in Spain where her father had been living, then moving on to France and the town where Lily grew up.

For me the joy of reading this book was taking Peter's journey of discovery with him, thus I don't want to reveal more of the plot. I will say that the focus is on the French who collaborated with the Germans in World War II and the lasting effects that the German occupation had in France after the war.

This is a suspenseful story, cleverly told, and a page turner. New pieces of information about Lily and her father and their past are gradually revealed, in a realistic way. Peter Simon is resourceful and determined, although he finds it difficult to move outside of his comfort zone while hunting down the truth and his wife.

The story is very believable, partly because Peter knows enough French to get along well in France. We get to know him very well, and there are some great secondary characters. Two policemen are favorites of mine, one in New York (Detective Sergeant Ivan Kovalski of the 61st Precinct), one in Veaudry, France (Alphonse Juneaux of the Police Nationale's Provincial Department of Criminal Investigation).

In 2014 I read Loot (my review here), another book by Aaron Elkins about events related to World War II and its aftermath. That one is on a different subject, the looting of art treasures during the war. Elkins is better known for his series about Gideon Oliver, a forensic anthropologist whose nickname is "The Skeleton Detective".

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Publisher:  William Morrow, 2002.
Length:     298 pages
Format:     Hardcover
Setting:     New York, Spain, France
Genre:      Historical mystery
Source:     I purchased my copy.