Total recall (Paretsky, Sara)(2001, paperback)

Regular price $6.00

For V.I. the journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protestors are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets. Replayed on the evening news is a clip of a slight and vulnerable man who has stood up at the conference to tell his terrible story of a childhood shattered by the Holocaust - a story that has devastating consequences for V.I.‘s cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel.

Lotty was a girl of nine when she emigrated from Austria to England as part of a Kindertransport - a group of children sent abroad by their desperate parents just before war broke out to save them from the Nazi terror. Now, stunningly - impossibly- it appears that someone from that long-lost past may have returned. With the help of a recovered-memory therapist, Paul Radbuka has recently learned his true identity. But is he who he claims? Or is he a cunning impostor who has usurped someone else’s history....a history Lotty has tried to forget for over fifty years?

As a frightened V.I. watches her friend unravel, she sets out to help in the only way she can: by investigating Radbuka’s past. Already working on a difficult case for a poor family cheated of their life insurance, she tries to balance Lotty’s needs with her clients’, only to find that both are drawn into a web of crime and deceit that stretches from Switzerland, London and Germany to Chicago..........