First published 2017
Jacob Rigolet sits in an auction house when his mother walks down the aisle and hurls black ink at a Robert Capa photograph. The former head librarian at Halifax Free Library has just destroyed "Death on a Leipzig Balcony" in front of a shocked crowd. Jacob's fiancée Martha Crauchet, a police detective, gets assigned to interrogate his mother about the vandalism. Jacob works as an assistant to a wealthy art collector, but this incident forces him to examine his family's past. His investigation reveals disturbing truths about the man he believed was his father. Robert Emil was a Halifax police officer in 1945 who faced suspicion for killing two Jewish residents during a wave of anti-Semitism. The case against Emil never resulted in conviction, but Jacob must confront this dark history. The story builds toward a violent confrontation and an unexpected birth at the Halifax Free Library, where another Rigolet was born thirty years earlier.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, crime, detective, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful
Tropes: dark-secrets, family-legacy, investigation
Setting: Halifax, Halifax Free Library, Leipzig
Period: 1945
245 pages · Hardcover · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Content warnings: violence