The bookworm : a novel

Summary: Why did Hitler chose not to invade England when he had the chance? Europe, 1940: It's late summer and Belgium has been overrun by the German army. Posing as a friar, a British operative talks his way into the monastery at Villers-devant-Orval just before Nazi art thieves plan to sweep through the area and whisk everything of value back to Berlin. But the ersatz man of the cloth is no thief. Instead, that night he adds an old leather Bible to the monastery's library and then escapes. London, 2017: A construction worker operating a backhoe makes a grisly discovery--a skeletal arm-bone with a rusty handcuff attached to the wrist. Was this the site, as a BBC newsreader speculates, of "a long-forgotten prison, uncharted on any map?" One viewer knows better: it's all that remains of a courier who died in a V-2 rocket attack. The woman who will put these two disparate events together--and understand the looming tragedy she must hurry to prevent--is Russian historian and former Soviet chess champion Larissa Mendelovg Klimt, "Lara the Bookworm, " to her friends. She's also experiencing some woeful marital troubles.