The Girl in the Photo
In book three of the Hanni Winter series, Hanni is living her new life in 1950, still harboring a sinister secret but determined to move on. When she does her first photographic exhibition in Berlin, it is a rousing success. But one picture of a four-year-old girl sends Hanni and her detective husband, Freddy, to a former Nazi holding/propaganda camp and beyond in search of his missing sister, Renny. Hanni and Freddy expected dangerous obstacles along the way, but Hanni soon finds there is more than one evil to contend with. And her secret threatens to destroy them both.
As this series continues, it gets more and more intriguing. Hanni’s conflicting desires to keep her marriage intact and bring her father, a former concentration camp commandant, to justice, threaten her more than ever before. As Hanni and Freddy go to the former Theresienstadt camp and then Prague in search of his sister, her complicated past gets in the way. The manner in which Hanni’s father brings darkness and evil into her life is so well-written in this saga. His boundless cruelty and manipulation are perfectly portrayed. Freddy’s frantic attempt to find Renny is one example of the desperate, heart-rending searches for surviving family members after the Holocaust. At the bottom of it all is Hanni’s against-the-odds desire to do good in an impossible situation. I was spellbound by this good versus evil battle, where evil seemed to be pulling out all the stops. It is a realistic, heart-shattering look at the aftermath of possibly the most wicked and despicable regime to ever exist. This post-World War II mystery/thriller will break your heart, but it is a must-read.
