Karolina's Twins

July 1, 2016
The third in Balson's promising series about a husband-and-wife investigation team specializing in Holocaust cases.Hard-bitten Chicago private eye Liam Taggart and his attorney wife, Catherine Lockhart, met while solving a Holocaust-related mystery in the first installment, Once We Were Brothers (2013). Now, as the pair is anticipating the imminent birth of their firstborn, they are contacted by Lena Woodward. A wealthy widow in her 80s, Lena hopes to locate the twin daughters of her friend Karolina, who perished during the Holocaust. Lena relates her story to Catherine incrementally throughout the book. Her survivor account becomes the main source of suspense, since she is reluctant to reveal the full horror of what she experienced until the end. Meanwhile, her son, Arthur, is suing for control of her affairs, claiming that Lena suffers from dementia. The basis for his petition for guardianship is his mother's sudden obsession with an impossibly quixotic quest. At least that is the ostensible reason--Arthur's real motivation, Catherine suspects, is that he fears his mother will dissipate his inheritance on a wild goose chase. We learn that Lena was orphaned after the Nazis occupied her small Polish town, Chrzanow, that she was assigned to work with Karolina in a coat factory in the ghetto, and that Karolina's German lover kept the two girls supplied with enough food to survive. Ultimately, the ghetto is liquidated and the two girls are sent, again through the intervention of a sympathetic German, to Gross-Rosen, a less lethal--comparatively speaking--concentration camp. On the train, Karolina is warned that the Nazis will kill her infants upon arrival at the camp. The desperate measure the friends take to save the twins may have caused their deaths and has haunted Lena her entire life. Scenes involving a cantankerous probate judge demonstrate that Balson, a practicing Chicago attorney, knows his way around a courtroom. Balson's dialogue is stilted and his prose is workmanlike, but the survivor's tale is the main attraction and does not disappoint.

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June 15, 2016

Lena Woodward, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, asks Catharine Lockhart, a Chicago attorney, and her husband, Liam, a private investigator, to find her best friend Karolina's twin daughters, who were lost in 1943 during their transport by the Germans to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Lena reveals a heartbreaking tale of a mother's love, friendship, and family in the face of increasingly brutal conditions and the constant threat of imminent death in Nazi-occupied Poland. Lena's son Arthur is convinced it is all a hoax, a plan by someone to separate his mother from her money. A pregnant Catherine, naturally empathetic to the plight of innocent babies, finds herself potentially in contempt of court by insisting on upholding a critical attorney-client confidentiality. The overall theme and quick flow of the narrative are reminiscent of the author's first novel, Once We Were Brothers, but the story itself is quite dissimilar. VERDICT Readers interested in the continuing manifestations of the horrors of the Holocaust will find this tale compelling.--Vicki Gregory, Sch. of Information, Univ. of South Florida, Tampa

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2016
Attorney Catherine Lockhart and private investigator Liam Taggart are back in Balson's third novel, this time with a new client, Lena Woodward, an elderly Holocaust survivor. Lena's son doesn't want them looking into anything and forces a competency hearing for his mother, hoping to have himself appointed her guardian. Meanwhile, Lena spends days telling Catherine about her childhood in Poland, the Nazi takeover of her town, her job as a seamstress that helped her avoid the first wave of Jews sent to concentration camps, her time with the Resistance, her eventual trip to a camp, and her life since the war. Along the way, her childhood best friend, Karolina, is present, and the two girls try to save her twin babies during the war. Lena has no idea what happened to the babies, but if they survived, they would be 70 years old, and she is determined to find them. The search takes Liam to Poland, Israel, and Germany, but it is Lena's story that is so riveting. In a departure from Balson's previous novels, much of the story is told in the first person, befitting a book inspired by a Holocaust survivor's true story. Readers who crave more books like Balson's Once We Were Brothers (2013) and Kristin Hannah's best-selling The Nightingale (2014) will be enthralled by Karolina's Twins.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)