NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A spectacular mystery-complex, fast-paced yet ruminative, and imbued with the grim awareness, shared by all intelligent hard-boiled novels, that the past always catches up with us … a thrilling and even moving mystery. -The Washington Post Book World

V.I.‘s journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protesters
are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets. Replayed on the evening news is
the scene of a slight man who has stood up at the conference to tell an astonishing
story of a childhood shattered by the Holocaust - a story that has devastating consequences
for V.I.’s cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel.

Lotty was a girl of nine
when she emigrated from Austria to England, one of a group of children wrenched from
their parents and saved from the Nazi terror just before the war broke out. Now stunningly-impossibly-it appears that someone from that long-lost past may have returned.

With the help of a recovered-memory therapist, Paul Radbuka has recently learned
his true identity. But is he who he claims to be? Or is he a cunning impostor who
has usurped someone else’s history … a history Lotty has tried to forget for over
fifty years?

As a frightened V.I. watches her friend unravel, she sets out to help
in the only way she can: by investigating Radbuka’s past. Already working on a difficult
case for a poor family cheated of their life insurance, she tries to balance Lotty’s
needs with her client’s, only to find that both are spiraling into a whirlpool of
international crime that stretches from Switzerland and Germany to Chicago’s South
Side.

As the atrocities of the past reach out to engulf the living, V.I. struggles
to decide whose memories of a terrible war she can trust, and moves closer to a chilling
realization of the truth-a truth that almost destroys her oldest friend.