Turncoat

by Aaron Elkins

Overview

“A headlong plunge into dark places and dark minds” from the Edgar Award–winning author of the Gideon Oliver Mysteries (Statesman Journal).
 
Pete Simon’s all-American life was everything he ever wanted: a good home, a satisfying career, and a marriage still strong and loving after nearly twenty years. But in the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, everything is about to change.
 
It starts with the appearance of an old man at his door, ranting madly about money, death, and forgiveness. The man is a stranger to Pete—but not to his wife, Lily. Only later does the truth come out. The unwelcome visitor was Lily’s father, who she had claimed died during World War II in their native France, executed by the Nazis. The next day, he truly is dead, his savagely beaten body washed up in a nearby marsh—and Lily disappears, leaving behind only a brief, enigmatic note asking Pete not to look for her. Now, with a business card from an antiques dealer in Barcelona as his only lead, Pete sets out on a twisted and perilous journey that will carry him to places where the hideous crimes of the Nazis remain fresh in the minds of those who cannot forget . . . or forgive. But each door Pete opens leads him deeper into a painful and shocking past that threatens everything he holds most dear. And suddenly he has become more than a confused and distraught husband; the bitter truths that he uncovers one by one in the search for Lily now make him—and her—the targets of desperate, dangerous men and their terrifying vengeance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781497643291
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Publication date:	07/08/2014
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Aaron Elkins is a former anthropologist and professor who has been writing mysteries and thrillers since 1982. His major continuing series features forensic anthropologist‑detective Gideon Oliver, “the Skeleton Detective.” There are fifteen published titles to date in the series. The Gideon Oliver books have been (roughly) translated into a major ABC‑TV series and have been selections of the Book‑of‑the‑Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the Readers Digest Condensed Mystery Series. His work has been published in a dozen languages.

 Mr. Elkins won the 1988 Edgar Award for best mystery of the year for Old Bones, the fourth book in the Gideon Oliver Series. He and his cowriter and wife, Charlotte, also won an Agatha Award, and he has also won a Nero Wolfe Award. Mr. Elkins lives on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula with Charlotte.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

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.

But first things first....

Something was wrong with my eyes. I could make out the peeling white farmhouse and the ramshackle outbuildings, I could see the sheep nuzzling the grass in the dappled shade of a clearing about twenty yards from where I lay in the thicket, flat on my stomach; I could see the slender, unnaturally still woman in the apron and the long blue dress, holding a basket propped against her hip and peering -- or at least facing -- in my direction. But it was all wavery and fuzzed over, as if I were looking through misted glass. I couldn't make out her face, or whether she was young or old, or what was in the basket, or whether or not she'd spotted me.

I knew that all I could do was lie there -- my legs didn't seem to be working right either -- and pray that I was hidden by the vines and brambles. I tried to remember how I'd come to be there, but couldn't quite put it together. We'd taken off from England that morning on another bombing run, headed for the benzol plant near Linz; I remembered that much. We'd completed the mission and made our turnaround. And then at about the Austrian border the flak had started popping, and then the Focke-Wulfs had shown up, and we were in big trouble. Three of them slipped through our escort of P-51s and screamed straight up at us, homing in as if they'd decided from the beginning that out of the whole350th Bombardment Group -- two dozen B-17s, plus three hundred additional bombers filling the skies around us -- it was us alone, the Betty G, they were after; nobody but us.

The next thing I knew...well, the next thing I knew, there I was lying on my stomach in the thicket, injured and frightened, looking at the woman without a face and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. I didn't remember our getting hit, I didn't remember Captain Slocum ordering us to bail out, and I didn't remember jumping, or getting rid of my parachute when I landed, or anything. I was starboard waist gunner. Had I even had a chance to fire? I couldn't remember that either.

I realized with a start -- probably it was the look of the farmhouse and the soft, rolling countryside -- that I'd come down in France, not Germany. She was a Frenchwoman! My heart came near to bursting with relief. Not only was I likely to be in friendly territory, I was in my native land. I'd been born in Lyon and spent most of my childhood there before my father brought us to the States.

"Madame!" I called, surprised to hear how feeble my voice was. "Au secours! Je suis un aviateur Américain. Mon avion a été démoli par les Boches."

Nothing. She just stood there without saying anything, without moving, as impassive as a statue, for a long time, and when she did begin to speak it was in a weird monotone, a chant, nothing like normal speech. The individual words were French, all right, but the sentences were gibberish, and I began to get a scary, queasy feeling that something was terribly wrong -- even more terribly wrong than it obviously was, I mean.

If only I could get out of these clothes, I thought. I was roasting. The waist gunners' slots were the coldest places in the plane -- no glassed-in turrets, just a couple of big rectangular open holes in the fuselage, and at twenty thousand feet oxygen was the least of our problems.

The temperature could get to twenty below zero, with a freezing wind that could crack your bones. So we had to dress accordingly, and I was still in my heavy leather flight jacket, overpants, and boots, and my heavy cap with the ear flaps pulled tight. I felt as if I were liquefying inside my casing of fleece-lined leather. No, I was liquefying. My ribs had begun to melt into a soft mush. I could feel them running out from under...

I'm hallucinating, I thought with a jolt. None of this is happening. I'm strapped into my bed in the mental ward at Kings County General, writhing and sweating, and dreaming the whole thing up. And not for the first time either. No. I've been here before: the same thicket, the same stony, faceless figure, the same torpid, dopey sheep. In another minute, the rest of the cast will come marching out from around the corner of the farmhouse.

And out they came. Sometimes they were rustic farm people, or soldiers, or policemen, but most of the time, as now, they were fussy-looking village functionaries of some kind in pince-nez, wing collars, and rusty black suits. They filed out two by two, six of them, muttering and wringing their hands, while some of them banged pots and pans together. Hallucination or not, the whole thing was scaring the hell out of me, and when the woman in blue began to move toward me -- to glide as if on rollers, not to walk -- I screamed. For a moment the scene shimmered, struggling to hold itself together. Then it fell apart into ragged pieces and I was staring at the light fixture on my ceiling, with the tattered, long-dead moth inside that I never seemed to get around to removing.

I was sweating, all right, and the twisted bedclothes proved I'd been doing plenty of writhing, but I wasn't strapped into any bed in the mental ward, and in fact I never had been. In a mental ward, that is...

Turncoat. Copyright © by Aaron Elkins. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Best known for the witty, Francophiliac Gideon Oliver mystery series, Elkins here delivers a stand-alone thriller that probes wartime guilt from multiple angles. For history professor Pete Simon and his French-born wife, Lily, Brooklyn in 1963 is worlds away from the horrors of WWII. But when Lily's father, Marcel Vercier, turns up on their doorstep begging her to view an old film, the Simons' cozy life combusts. Lily had always maintained that her father had been shot by the Nazis in 1943; now, caught in her lie and troubled by unfathomable other secrets, she refuses to answer Pete's urgent questions. Before the Simons can see the film, Vercier is murdered, and masked thugs break into their apartment, demanding to have it. Lily hands it over, then disappears, leaving Pete a cryptic note about needing space. Feeling like a sap, Pete decides to find her anyway, flying to Barcelona, where Vercier was apparently partner in an antiques dealership. A tough interview with the dead man's cagey co-partner, Charles Lebrun, reveals little about the film, the murder or Lily's whereabouts, but it does enlighten Pete as to Vercier's wartime collaboration with Nazi occupiers. As Pete delves deeper into Vercier's past, he learns painful truths about Lily's family, finally concluding, When it comes to making blanket moral judgements about people"please, leave me out of it. Some of the characters are sketchy, particularly Lily, who never amounts to more than an incredible simulation of Leslie Caron. The plot takes familiar paths, with an ending that ties up matters rather too neatly, especially given Pete's hard-earned tolerance for moral relativity. Still, this first-person novel captivates, largely because Pete's voice, a garlicky mix of France and Brooklyn, always sounds just right. 5-city West Coast author tour. (May 1) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

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 filmcontained 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. Author tour

Kirkus Reviews

If it’s true that readers like nothing more than to be surprised, then they’re in store for many pleasures in this Elkins thriller, which concerns shrouded events that occurred in a small town in occupied France. In 1963, the father of Peter Simon’s French-born wife--a man she claims died in the war--shows up on the couple’s New York doorstep. Soon after, the father is murdered, and Peter’s wife goes missing. Finding her involves a trip to Europe and investigation into a harrowing past. For lucky listeners, the story entails unexpected twists on every cassette. Christopher Lane sounds like a regular guy--one who is thoroughly pushed, traumatized, and tested. The fun--and the surprises--don’t let up until deep into the final tape. M.O. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 03 - AudioFile