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Leonard J. Rosen

Author of All Cry Chaos

14 Works 538 Members 55 Reviews

About the Author

Includes the name: Leonard Rosen

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Works by Leonard J. Rosen

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Common Knowledge

Birthdate
1954-01-07
Gender
male
Nationality
USA
Birthplace
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Occupations
teacher

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The Tenth Witness
by Leonard Rosen
The Permanent Press
Reviewed by Karl Wolff

“I begin, therefore, as I have for thirty years: with the body of a man floating face down in the slack water of Terschelling Island.” Henri Poincare, the narrator, continues, “And the world is well rid of him.” The body's identity and how Henri comes about to justify this homicide will propel The Tenth Witness forward. Beginning off the Dutch coast in late spring 1978, Henri Poincare and his fellow engineer Alec Chin are set to salvage the HMS Lutine. The Lutine sank off the coast in 1799, laden with tons of gold. But before Henri begins work on the salvaging operation, he decides to take a short vacation by hiking across the mud flats of the Wadden Sea. His guide is Liesel Kraus, an athletic beauty with a troubling past.

As Henri finds himself falling in love with Liesel, he decides to investigate the Kraus family. Liesel gives Henri a copy of a biography of Otto von Kraus, the patriarch of the family and mastermind behind Kraus Steel. The current head of Kraus Steel is Liesel's brother Anselm. What confounds Henri is how the Kraus family acquired (or preserved?) its wealth. According to the biography of Otto von Kraus, he was a member in good standing of the Nazi Party. He used slave labor, but was exonerated from prosecution of war crimes due to the positive testimonies of ten witnesses. This strikes a nerve with Henri, since his uncle was Jewish and he understands the evil perpetrated by the Nazi regime, even if the Kraus family wants to whitewash it.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, Henri attempts to meet the surviving witnesses. Except the witnesses he plans to meet end up dying in dubious circumstances.

The convenient deaths occur at the same time Anselm woos Henri into working as a consultant for Kraus Steel. He takes Henri to a ship-breaking yard in India. While Anselm sees the unsafe conditions as just another line on a budget ledger, the ship-breaking yard horrifies Henri. He also sees parallels between the ship-breaking yard and Nazi slave labor. (And a delightful example to bring up to opponents of raising the American minimum wage.) Anselm recruited Henri's talents because he wants Henri to come up with a process for salvaging computers and other electronic equipment. After a near fatal accident in the lab working on an electronics salvaging process, Henri has to face some tough choices. The trouble continues to mount as Anselm's recruitment techniques turn into strong arm tactics and the biography Liesel gave to Henri becomes less and less credible. Henri's torturous conflicts with the family business and his love for Liesel draw him deeper and deeper into corporate corruption and a race hatred he's finding everywhere, even within himself.

The Tenth Witness is a prequel to Leonard Rosen's critically acclaimed and Macavity Award-winning first novel, All Cry Chaos. Why did I give the novel a perfect 10? It is a combination of the excellent writing, compelling characters, and its tapestry of histories. It weaves together the history of the HMS Lutine, the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the Seventies. Histories reflect and refract off other histories, putting the novel in the category of Seventies Eurothrillers with Nazi villains (think Marathon Man and more tangentially, The Night Porter). In the Sixties and Seventies, the German population wanted to sweep the Nazi war crimes under the carpet and just get along with their lives. At least that's what the parents told their children who now asked that tricky question, “Grandpa, what did you do during the War?” It also brings to light the criminal atrocities done in the name of saving a nickel like ship-breaking by an indentured worker class and our current practice of recycling electronics in a less than healthful manner. But who cares about them? Buy that new iPhone that's a quarter inch thinner and forget where the last one went … or what it is doing to the worker's eyes and lungs.

Leonard Rosen ties together all these disparate narrative strands in a book less than 300 pages long. The various histories and personalities melded together seamlessly, reminding me of the baroque complexity of Alan Moore's Watchmen. It is a stunning achievement.

Out of 10/10

https://driftlessareareview.com/2014/02/21/cclap-fridays-the-tenth-witness-by-le...
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kswolff | 21 other reviews | Apr 30, 2020 |
Love, love, love this book. The main characters, grandfather Nate and granddaughter Grace, are two of the best characters I’ve read in a long time. They are a good match—both prickly and difficult— but they have moral courage and they call things like they see them. Their dialog is one of the book’s many highlights, and their struggle to understand and support each other would be enough of a story by itself. But Rosen takes the novel two big steps forward when he sets their relationship in a present day crime ring and in the context of a profound and tragic family drama stemming from events in WWII. The crime plot gives the novel a brisk suspenseful pace, while the slowly revealed family story adds real emotional depth. And the theme of magic runs through everything like a beautiful melody. Nate is a magician trying to pass on his skills and his hard-won wisdom to Grace. As he teaches her magic, he reveals himself (his passion, his values, and his regrets) by degrees and we come to appreciate the magician’s art in a whole new way.… (more)
 
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Elisabeth.Elo | 1 other review | Jan 31, 2019 |
The magician teaches his apprentice to tell stories, because it’s story that diverts the listener from watching the hands; story gives the magic shape, and story offers escape. Just for a moment, a small child laughs, and it doesn’t matter that the coin was a trick; what matters is the spark of joy and the knowledge that it’s real. In Leonard Rosen’s The Kortelisy Escape, the tricks are delightfully diagramed and explained, but the story grows, keeping the reader distracted from past and future. There’s a different magic, a literary magic, at work behind the scenes.

Jailed by a cruel trick of manmade laws, freed by an even crueler trick, betrayed by friend, determined to rescue brother, and ensnared by the magic of unexpected affection, Nate Larson is a magician who surely can’t escape. Granddaughter Grace is a willing and cynical apprentice, running from her own many betrayals, and determined never to return to another foster home. But will they let each other down in the end? Will fate betray them? Or is there a magical trick that can rescue them?

The magician’s tales build fairytale joy from cruel despairs of his youth. Truth leaks around the edges, and, as in the best of magic, nothing is quite what it seems. But how? The reader is caught, watching and reading the sleight of hand, trusting author and character to make it work, and eagerly praying for a happy ending.

Kortelisy itself is not what it seems either. And the Russian dolls on the cover of this book illustrate the story perfectly. Holding, keeping, stealing, freeing, telling… this book does it all, and is a solidly real and magical read.

Disclosure: I was given a preview edition and I love it!
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SheilaDeeth | 1 other review | Sep 20, 2018 |
Interpol agent and descendant of the great mathmatician, Henri Poincare investigates a death by a mysterious explosion at a WTO meeting. This is the first in the series and I will look for the next one.
 
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gbelik | 29 other reviews | May 7, 2018 |

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Works
14
Members
538
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Rating
3.9
Reviews
55
ISBNs
56
Languages
5

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