The ghost of the old-fashioned romantic war novel comes gloriously to life in Nicholas Edlin's hypnotizing story of lust and betrayal during the Second World War. Replete with dusty drawing rooms, sinister butlers, Axis spies and fresh-faced Yanks who brawl with world-weary locals, The Widow's Daughter unspools an irresistible, darkly lovely web of intrigue, arriving at an epic and satisfying conclusion. Luxuriously paced with note-perfect tone and graceful prose, it gives readers a pleasure too smart, too refined to inspire any guilt.
Peter Sokol is an American surgeon stationed in New Zealand. Divorced, disaffected and more interested in art than a medical career, Sokol finds his hardened senses lit aflame by a mysterious local beauty. Emily's family, European immigrants tumbling into war-time penury, seem eager to auction their daughter to either Sokol or Cartwright, who is Sokol's colleague, nemesis, former brother-in-law and a widely acknowledged horse's ass. Emily clearly prefers Sokol, but an air of gloomy foreboding--and the fact that Sokol is remembering the story from an Emily-less future--indicate dark forces will doom this passion.
Edlin's choice to set the tale amid the largely-unexamined American presence in New Zealand allows him to take the reader to a forgotten corner of the war, a place where soldiers with overflowing amounts of money to spend force locals to endure a boom in licentiousness and drunkenness (along with the casual cluelessness of the occupying troops). It's a new and welcome perspective, and it adds just the right amount of modernity to this perfect execution of a classic form. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic