Nevermore: Lisette's List, Blood on Snow, A Land Remembered, Vanished

Reported by Jeanne

First up in Nevermore was Lisette’s List by Susan Vreeland.  The story begins in 1937, when young bride Lisette has to move from her beloved Paris to a tiny village in Provence in order to take care of her husband’s grandfather, Pascal.  She finds compensation in hearing Pascal’s stories of the great artists:  he had been a pigment salesman and knew artists such as Pizarro and Cezanne who had gifted him with paintings. Then World War II begins, and Lisette’s world is again turned upside down as the Nazis invade.  Our reader proclaimed it to be an excellent novel, especially for those interested in art, but with a wide ranging appeal.

The next book was A Land Remembered by Patrick Smith, another historical novel but this one begins in 1858 in Florida when Tobias McIvey decides to start on new life on the frontier.  The novel follows several generations of the McIvey family as they struggle through hardships to become wealthy and influential.  The book covers a century of Florida history and has won numerous awards since its publication in 1984.  Our reader especially appreciated the attention to environmental detail.

Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo centers on Olav, a hitman who is hired to take out a special target—the crime boss’s wife.  Olav knows it’s a very dangerous assignment from the start, as he will likely be eliminated by someone else because he knows too much.  Once he started shadowing his victim, another complication surfaces: he falls in love with her.  Our reader said Blood on Snow was very different from Nesbo’s usual work, almost poetic.  He loved it.

Nonfiction was well represented with Vanished by Wil Hylton. In 1944, a B-24 went down near the island of Palau in the Pacific with eleven crew members.  Despite the large size of the plane, the wreckage was never found.  Sixty years later, Dr. Pat Scanlon, a diver with an interest in locating WW II planes, took up the challenge to find out what became of the plane and crew. Our reader said it was interesting and noted that she read it for the mystery and not its literary quality.

Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II, by Wil S. Hylton

Reviewed by William Wade

The book begins with the story of Tommy Doyle, born during World War II, but never knowing his father who was a serviceman killed in the conflict.  The curious thing was that his mother never said anything to the boy about his father’s death.  Did he die a hero?  As Tommy grew up he came to hear disturbing whispers that his father was not dead, but had survived the war, returned home, married someone else, and was then living in another state.

Tommy knew that his mother  had an old trunk, and he came to suspect that it held answers to guarded family secrets.  Even after she died and Tommy was married, he could not bring himself to open the trunk.  Its presence seemed to dominate the family household and to threaten black revelations best left undisturbed. But Tommy’s wife Nancy was of a different personality, and she asked permission to open the trunk.  He agreed, and it was found to contain many personal items, including loving letters to his wife that Tommy’s father had written from outposts in the Southern Pacific.  But why it had remained locked for so long remained a mystery. Nancy encouraged Tommy to seek more information about his father and the circumstances of his death. And this search becomes the theme and core of the book.

They began with the obvious and known facts. His father, Jimmie Doyle, had been a gunner on an American bomber known as the B-24 “Liberator” that was shot down during a mission against the Japanese-held island of Palau in the Southern Pacific.  The body had never been recovered, the plane’s wreckage had never been located, and Jimmie was officially “missing in action.” Government sources had little additional information, but Tommy and Nancy soon made contacts with relatives of other MIAs who were ready with friends and suggestions who would help.  The search led to Palau, where aging tribesmen described the crash of an American plane.  Confusion about their accounts led to the discovery that on more than one occasion American bombers had crashed on the island; indeed, there were three.  Search efforts were conducted on the island and in the surrounding waters; technical information about the B-24 “Liberator” was extracted from Ford Motor Company archives, which had built the plane.  Families of the other crew members joined in the effort.  The quest led in many varied directions, including the life of Charles Lindberg and his participation in the American war effort in the Pacific.  The entire strategy of the Pacific War was explored in order to understand why fighting came to that lonely little island of Palau.

At this point the temptation is to say nothing about the ultimate results of the search and let the reader dig out the facts himself.  But we will leap ahead to the conclusion and say that the day finally arrived when the correct wreckage was identified, its contents were removed, including body parts, and among the items a dogtag with the name DOYLE.  More recent DNA analysis led to the conclusion that in the wreckage the remains of five men could be identified and the remaining body parts were buried in April 2010 in Arlington National Cemetery in an appropriate service.

Today Palau is an island country with close ties to US.  It consists of about 250 islands, with a population of 20,000 and is located SE of the Philippines and N of New Guinea. The natives are related to the Filipinos. Palau’s chief economic resource is tourism plus some fishing. The currency is the dollar. Palau’s history has been rather chaotic.  It became a Spanish colony in 16^th century, but it was sold to Germany after 1898. During World War I, it was seized by Japan; then during World War II it was taken by US and made part of US Trust Territory in 1947.  It became fully independent in 1994 and is a member of the United Nations.