TURNCOAT

A mostly engaging thriller in which the sins of WWII ensnare a Brooklyn couple.

Departing from his anthropologist-sleuth Gideon Oliver series (Skeleton Dance, 2000, etc.), Elkins starts here with some stock-in-trade thriller elements. Pete Simon, a history teacher at Brooklyn College, can’t parse a strange, recurring dream, while outside his home, a disturbance erupts between Lily, his wife of 17 years, and a stranger. With some prodding from Pete, Lily confesses that the stranger was her father, Marcel Vercier, who isn’t dead, as she’d told Pete. Not yet. A few days later he’s found murdered, and thugs in ski masks menace Pete and Lily for a missing reel of film, its contents somehow connected to secrets from WWII. And then a gushing, weeping Lily flees to an unknown destination in Europe. Readers willing to believe that the close couple could never have tripped over some clue to Vercier’s existence will stay on to enjoy Pete’s search for Lily. Assisted by some sharply sketched local characters in Barcelona, Pete gathers information. Vercier’s business partner, Charles Lebrun, says that Vercier sold the Nazis antiques confiscated from Jews. Worse, Simon sees a photograph of Lily in the French village where she grew up. Hair shorn, a swastika tarred between her exposed breasts, she stands humiliated for having had an affair with a German soldier. Now a blossoming Sherlock, Pete deduces from the number of folds in one of Lily’s letters where she’s hiding in Europe. Off he sails to Corsica for a busy wrap-up, where he learns the details of her past, retrieves the film, and faces off with a remnant band of resistance fighters. Safely back in Brooklyn, he and Lily discover what the film contained as Simon muses over the relative nature of good and evil in the deeds of humanity, a theme Elkins threads through the work.

Likable and satisfying.