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Loading... Once Upon a Time (2002)by Barbara Fradkin
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Once Upon A Time is the second in the Inspector Green series by Barbara Fradkin. When an old man dies in a hospital parking lot, apparently of hypothermia, the Ottawa authorities are content to declare it a "natural death" and to leave it at that. Something doesn't look right to Inspector Mike Green, however, and he decides to investigate on his own time, with the help of Sergeant Sullivan of course. Together, they learn some unsavory details about the dead man, but it's only when another old man disappears that they start realizing that the death was anything but natural, and the causes reach far back into another time and place: Poland in World War II, to be precise. And the most intimate secrets of that past return to haunt the present.... I started this series in the middle and went back to the beginning because I enjoyed it right away, even though Inspector Green is not the most pleasant of characters: he's moody, self-involved and selfish, to name a few reasons to dislike him. But he's also dogged, determined and gifted with an ability to follow his own leaps of intuition, so that the reader is fascinated by his methods of detection. I generally don't read stories (or watch films) dealing with the Holocaust; as a TA during my undergraduate years, I worked for a professor who taught a course on the subject and after screening "Night and Fog" a half dozen times and listening to the recollections of survivors a gazillion times as I laboriously transcribed them, I figured I've paid my dues. But I'm glad I read this one, because it shows that during that (or any) time, the motives of humans are far more complex than we often believe. Recommended. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Series
When an old man dies a seemingly natural death in a parking lot, only Inspector Michael Green finds it suspicious. Something about the closed case has caught his eye - why did the victim have a mysterious gash on his head, inflicted around the time of his death? Talking to the man's family only increases Green's curiosity. They are obviously hiding something about the old man, who lived in isolation as though avoiding painful memories. A search of his house turns up an old tool box with a hidden compartment containing a German ID card from World War II. Was the victim a Jewish camp survivor or a Nazi soldier trying to escape imprisonment? Or had he been a Polish collaborator who had sold his own people into slavery and death? Could someone have tracked him down for revenge? Even Green, with all his experience, could never have imagined the truth. The sequel to Do or Die is not only a tightly plotted police mystery, but a compelling tale of unhealed emotional wounds from a time of unspeakable atrocity. No library descriptions found. |
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