THE PEARL THIEF by Fiona McIntosh

 

It's 1963, London, 35 year old antique jewellery expert Severine Kassel is on loan from the Louvre to the British Museum to assist the latter in the provenance of its jewellery collection. She is asked to look at a most unusual and glorious Byzantine pearl necklace. The unexpected shock of seeing this item immediately propels her back to her past, threatening to destroy the carefully built up veneer and person that is Severine Kassel. Severine is really Katarina, born in Prague, of Jewish descent. Her family is cultured, reasonably wealthy and Katarina has a blessed early life. All that changes of course in 1938 when Czechoslovakia is annexed by Hitler. No need to give a history lesson here. Katarina, at 14, suffers and lives through terrible trauma and disaster. She comes through, in the process creating a brand new persona, known to only a few people. In the years since the war, however, she retains a burning hatred for the man responsible for what happened to her and her family. The appearance of the pearls unlocks the war time trauma, setting her on a path of revenge. She teams up with another Jewish survivor of the war, Daniel, who has his own agenda in the hunt for this man. 

A real page turner of a book, which I make to sound like a thriller but it is not really that at all. You could easily see this as yet another novel about WWII, the Holocaust and how the Jews were treated - it is, but it is also a very good novel with these themes. The hunt for the war criminal propels the action along, but there is so much more going on with Katarina's early life before the war, leading up to the catastrophe, her war time years, the closed off and distant persona she has made of herself. The characters themselves are wonderfully drawn, all of them - their physical descriptions, how they dress in those opening up years of the early 1960s. And the places they lived - what a beautiful city Prague was, how London and Paris were in the early 1960s, how people dined, how they lived, their interactions with each other, the observations in the world. It is fascinating to see how the characters grow and change as the story unfolds, especially the changes in Katarina as her war time demons are laid to rest.  If you are going on holiday - a restful holiday - then take this, especially if you are going to the English city of York and the surrounding area. Your inbuilt travel guide.