Praise for The Tenth Witness in Kirkus Reviews magazine!
Lloyds of London, which was the insurer for the HMS Lutine when it sank off
the Dutch coast in 1799, think it’s high time they recovered their settlement
by plundering the boat, which is legally theirs, for its cargo of gold.
Poincaré and his partner, Alec Chin, have successfully bid to construct a
diving platform to be used in the operation. But Poincaré gets seriously
redirected when he meets Liesel Kraus, a guide who pulls him out of the coastal
mud flats and insists that he escort her to her brother Anselm’s birthday party
to fend off the Bayer heir Anselm’s fixed her up with. Romance blossoms between
Liesel and Poincaré, along with dark suspicions about the Kraus family’s steel
empire, when Anselm, intent on jumping into the infant market for personal
computers by recycling the precious metals used in their manufacture, engages
Poincaré to develop a chemical process for isolating those metals. If Anselm
and Liesel’s father, Otto, was really a Schindler-style hero during the war, as
an affidavit signed by 10 concentration-camp survivors attests, then why are
the signatories suddenly dying of heart attacks? And why is Liesel’s godfather,
Viktor Schmidt, so eager to shut down Poincaré’s investigation into this case
that isn’t even a case? Torn between his love for Liesel and his need to learn the
truth about her family, Poincaré makes a series of discoveries that won’t
surprise genre fans or anyone who stayed awake during history class.
If it’s hard to wring new headlines from Nazi industrialists, Rosen uses this familiar background to tell a story as heartfelt as it is ambitious."
If it’s hard to wring new headlines from Nazi industrialists, Rosen uses this familiar background to tell a story as heartfelt as it is ambitious."
