At eighty-sev­en Rose Manon — the suc­cessful jour­nal­ist R. B. Manon — is still writ­ing a week­ly col­umn, work­ing out of her home in upstate New York, and cul­ti­vat­ing her gar­den. Her rou­tine is bro­ken by the arrival of an old red trunk that had been stored for fifty years in the base­ment of the news­pa­per she worked for in Paris in the 1930s. In open­ing the trunk Rose reopens the sto­ries of her life in the tumul­tuous years lead­ing up to the Nazi occu­pa­tion of Paris. 

As a cor­re­spon­dent based in Paris and Berlin, Rose Manon was at the cen­ter of pre­war Europe and had a reporter’s keen sense of the impend­ing Ger­man threat. Her dis­patch­es from Berlin catch the grow­ing ten­sion and ter­ror in the city and are the strongest sto­ry in the nov­el. But oth­er sto­ries are entwined with this sto­ry — Rose’s ambi­tious strug­gle to become an inter­na­tion­al jour­nal­ist in a man’s world, her love affair with a Ger­man Jew whose artis­tic skills pro­tect yet imprison him, an unex­pect­ed reconnec­tion with her estranged moth­er, the Jew­ish back­ground that her par­ents kept secret from her, the kid­nap­ping and mur­der of her cousin. The kid­nap­ping and mur­der were the start of this nov­el, based on the actu­al mur­der of a dis­tant cousin of the author’s. The account of the flam­boy­ant tri­al, based on fact, brings Colette and Janet Flan­ner into the sto­ry as a curi­ous sidelight. 

Even­tu­al­ly all these sto­ries begin to trip over one anoth­er, draw­ing the nov­el away from the com­pelling account of the emerg­ing Third Reich and the res­o­lu­tion of the oth­er strands. Rose’s tem­per flares in sud­den bursts that aren’t sus­tained, and some intrigu­ing hints— the Resis­tance efforts of Mr. Hin, an enig­mat­ic neigh­bor — are dropped in with no fur­ther men­tion. Michele Zack­heim has cre­at­ed a chal­leng­ing char­ac­ter in a world-chang­ing sit­u­a­tion but hasn’t quite giv­en either Rose or the onset of war their full due.

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