I'd name Kay Nolte Smith as a favorite author. Her books are all the more precious to me because soon after I discovered them she died of cancer, and I knew there would be no more. Recently I've been purging my book shelves, which I have to do periodically, otherwise those books breed. I took this book down, and thought it might be the time to put it in the discard pile, because this doesn't stick out in my mind the way her two historical novels do, A Tale of the Wind and Venetian Song or her story on the theme of dangers of worshiping genius, Elegy of a Soprano. Then I turned to the first page and read:

She stepped into the store and gazed around with a smile of content. Books. By the yard, the acre, the mile. Stacked in piles and packed in bursting rows, spilling out as if propelled by the energy of their words. And everywhere the smell: must and wood and aging paper and, somehow, a hint of spice. It exhilarated her to plunge into the past, as long as it wasn't her own.

She moved past the table of shiny new review copies, toward the remainders and secondhand books. The shelves were separated by such narrow aisles that she had to walk between them crablike and angle her head to read the spines, so that the long braid of her hair slid to one side.

The book store is never named, but I had to smile. For me it was such a vivid conjuration of one of the wonders of New York City, the Strand Bookstore, and that opening sucked me right in. And it wasn't long before I was feeling a renewed affection for these characters, in particular the protagonist depicted in that opening, Hedy Lucas. Hedy and her mother defected to the United States from the Soviet Union, leaving their father behind. Now, almost twenty years later, her father, a great living composer, is being allowed to travel abroad again to Finland. Hedy travels there to meet her father again and to try to learn why he never joined them in their escape.

I won't claim this is deathless literature or even at the top of the mystery genre in the tradition of a Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie. But it is definitely a well-written, at times insightful, and an entertaining mystery with a twist that isn't just clever but has emotional impact--and I find I can't part with this book in the name of a freed up space after all. ( )