osha341 (USA: NV) (2009/03/07): From Booklist This story of impossible love was perhaps easy for Shreve to outline, but a challenge to fill out in detail. That she carries it through successfully retains her extant fans (e.g., Where or When, 1993), and snags as well readers piqued by novels featuring Nazi hellhounds. They're after Ted Brice, a downed B-17 pilot who finds succor and more from an unhappily married Belgian woman, Claire, who furnishes a safe house for the resistance. After hesitant preliminaries, the lovers love in Shreve's tender rendering, but their idyll shatters with Brice's inevitable attempt to escape the hounds milling about. He is betrayed to the Gestapo, but the mystery of how hangs until 50 years later, when Shreve brings together the lovechild of the liaison with an elderly Claire, who reveals the secret of her husband's betrayal of the American. Shreve's strength is constructing the mood and texture of little intimacies, and, set against the huge context of Nazi occupation, they seem all the more worthwhile, however fleeting. A touching tome from a skilled pen. Gilbert Taylor
