In Shadowed by Death, the second novel in writer Mary Adler’s World War II mystery series, we’re taken back to America in the forties, and to a time when human kindness and human soullessness battled for the soul of the world.
Homicide detective Oliver Wright, a Marine wounded in the Pacific and his service dog, Harley, are back home in the San Francisco Bay area. Despite recovering from a nearly shattered leg, the military calls on Wright to investigate the near-fatal battering of Irina, a young woman found bruised and beaten on a local military base. The assignment leads to an equally complex assignment, protecting Sophia Nirenska, a Polish Jew whose life’s mission is to raise American awareness of the atrocities committed by Russia against her countrymen. She also proselytizes aiding orphaned Jewish children strewn across the world after the war is over.
Someone is trying to shut her up, at minimum, or kill her. Wright is given the task of protecting her at all costs. It’s not easy. Sophia is a survivor of the Nazi’s unrelenting attacks against Warsaw and a severe critic of Russia’s unacknowledged attacks against her countrymen. She is also uncompromising about being self-sufficient after having survived the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto and the disintegration of her family.
The question is who wants her dead the most: anti-Semites, Nazis, or Russians? Protecting her is no easy job.
Harley, Wright’s military-trained service dog, becomes a major player in his master’s twin investigations, both protecting Wright and helping to track down the people who are trying to hurt her.
More than just a thriller, this novel seemingly has a mission to educate 21st Century readers about some aspects of World War II that few may be familiar with. While the Holocaust is well known, the Russians capture and massacre of thousands of Poles at Katyn is less so. It took modern scholarship to prove Russia did it, not the Nazis. The dogged resistance of the U.S. to take in more Jews during the war years becomes part of the book’s informational side. Readers are given a detailed description of the bureaucratic quagmire that made emigration of European Jews here virtually impossible despite knowledge of the atrocities being committed against them.
These and other facts are expertly interwoven into the narrative as Wright tries to get to the bottom of who wants Sophia and Irina dead, and why.
In many ways, Wright becomes a surrogate for most Americans who never experienced the full impact of the war in Europe. As one character says, in part, “We must think of [these refugees] as having brought their own justice system with them, and for the duration, we will suspend ours where they are concerned… The communists who infiltrate the Polish underground inform on them to the Gestapo. The Poles who survive will be killed or imprisoned when Russia takes over Poland. [Those who] betrayed the resistance for years… will be the cause of suffering for even more years to come. We can only imagine how many people were tortured and killed because of [them], and how many more will be.”
Shadowed by Death is a powerful inventive thriller and a provocative look into some chilling aspects of World War II that have lost none of their relevance in today’s explosive international political climate. Highly recommended.
