The Letter Writer: A novel

The Letter Writer: A novel

The first thing Woodrow Cain sees when he steps off the train in New York City on February 9, 1942, is smoke from an ocean liner in flames in the harbor. Itâ€™s the Normandie, and word on the street is that it was burned by German saboteurs. â€œTen lousy minutes in New York and already his new life felt as full of loss and betrayal as the one heâ€™d left behind.â€

What he left behind in a small North Carolina town was a wife whoâ€™d left him, a daughter in the care of his sister, and a career as a police officer marred by questions surrounding his partnerâ€™s murder. When he gets a job with the NYPD, he wants to believe itâ€™s the beginning of a new life, though he suspects that the past is as tenacious as â€œa parasite in the bloodstream.â€

Itâ€™s on the job that Cain comes in contact with a man who calls himself Danziger. He has the appearance of a â€œcrackpot,â€ but he speaks five languages, has the manners of a man of means and educationâ€”and he appears to be the one person who can help Cain identify a body just found floating in the Hudson River. But who exactly is Danziger? Heâ€™s a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattanâ€™s Lower East Sideâ€”â€œa steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgettingâ€ for his clients, and perhaps for himself: he hints at a much more worldly past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse. For one thing, he knows how the dead man was involved in New York Cityâ€™s â€œLittle Deutschland,â€ where swastikas were proudly displayed just months before. And he also seems to know how the investigation will put Cainâ€”and perhaps his daughter and the woman heâ€™s fallen forâ€”in harmâ€™s way. But even Danziger canâ€™t know that the more he and Cain investigate, the nearer they come to the center of a citywide web of possibly traitorous corruption from which neither of them may get out alive.

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2016-04-19
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2016-04-19
Format	Kindle eBook