Smoke and Embers (Inspector Troy, 9)
Smoke and Embers is the ninth in Lawton’s Chief Inspector Troy series. The novel opens in London in 1950 but jumps back into WWII in Poland and Germany, including Auschwitz. In the first chapters, Scotland Yard’s Troy accidentally discovers that his sergeant is sleeping with a woman associated with a notorious racketeer—a man found suspiciously dead. His sergeant is up for a promotion Troy wants him to get, and so he investigates this potentially problematic lady friend. In the process, he comes upon the right-hand man of the criminal operation who claims to be a survivor of Auschwitz.
The novel’s twisty, skillful plot is less a traditional detective story than a series of intriguingly built characters that grab the reader’s sympathies, then shock expectations, and gradually intertwine in completely unexpected ways. Central to the novel’s themes are identity and the remaking of self in the aftermath of war and the worst humanity can do. Good and bad are presented as subtle, nuanced notions that defy even the most well-founded assumptions.
For Troy, solving the various murder cases that arise over the course of uncovering the “truth” about these people is a by-product. But who are you is not a simple question in this book, and it takes a master detective to unravel the answers.
