Shelf Awareness for Readers for Tuesday, January 26, 2016

From My Shelf

A First-Class Crime Novel

When we received the review of The Drifter (below), which calls it "a first-class crime novel set in a second-tier city with plenty of third-rate lowlifes," I read it immediately. Now a Nicholas Petrie fan, I was happy to be able to ask him a few questions.

Nicholas Petrie

His protagonist, former Marine Lieutenant Peter Ash, came home from multiple deployments with PTSD. Petrie is not a veteran, but "in the course of my work as a home inspector, I've had the opportunity to work for a number of returning veterans. I'm a curious guy, very interested in people, and I talk to everyone. Conversations with veterans really sparked something in me. I began to appreciate whatnovel's very first pages readers will know they are in the capable hands of a gifted storyteller.

The story opens in Kraków, Poland, in November 1939, when Anna Lania, a "tender, kind, good-hearted girl," is seven years old. Anna and her gregarious Papa are as thick as thieves, at home with many languages and with many friends, but "Of all people, she was certain that he liked talking to her best." A linguistics professor at the Jagiellonian University, her father taught his beloved daughter all the languages she knows--German, Russian, French, English and Yiddish, to name a few. He only wishes he could spare her the word war, "a heavy word in every language."

One day, Papa leaves her at Herr Docktor Fuchsmann's pharmacy, just for a few hours, he