Description
For nearly fifty years, from 1942 to 1992, Marianne has yearned for her long-lost father, who stole the atomic bomb from Stalin and, along with this two wives, helped save the world. After the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, it is as if a sea were receding, a tide going out, that exposes the secrets of a lost half century. Starting in Paris in the early 1990s, a wealthy countess (Marianne Didier) begins a global search for keys to her complex and dark past. She is fiftyish, widowed, still beautiful and elegant, with a lifetime of turbulent adventures, loves, losses, and tragedy. Now she sets it all aside to search for the two fundamental keys to her lost past and her identity. One is her mother, who lies buried on an isolated seashore in a small town in Siberia. That's where Stalin hoped to lure Marianne's father in the late 1940s to exact a horrible revenge for preventing the USSR from obtaining the atomic bomb via San Francisco in 1945. Marianne, who was conceived in San Francisco but born in Siberia, is still not clear about her mother's identity. That's because everything about her even more mysterious father is shrouded in secrecy, except his name: Tim Nordhall, a young U.S. Navy intelligence officer during World War Two. When she unravels the true story of Tim Nordhall, she will also learn the tragic story of her beautiful and heroic mother. Yesterday Thriller: Memories of Love and War rises to the tumultuous saga of a Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, while encompassing the panoramic and vividly peopled sweep of novels by Herman Wouk or Sidney Sheldon. The story covers fifty years (1942-1992), several continents, and the two greatest wars in human history-World War Two and the Cold War. The saga is a rich tapestry, peopled by vivid and surprising characters. It operates in two generations, and tells two stories in parallel. We follow the remarkable adventures and loves of Tim Nordhall from Africa to London to San Francisco, and we follow the path his daughter takes half a century later to unravel the mysteries of her own past. Along the way, we meet a host of lesser but all the more vivid characters, including some historically famous persons including OSS Director Wild Bill Donovan and Nazi U-Boat captain Johann Heinrich Fehler (U-234, commissioned to carry atomic bomb parts to Tokyo to unleash on Los Angeles and other U.S. cities). By chance, one of the many tiny moments in this novel, we spot a young U.S. Navy officer named Richard M. Nixon eating lunch at a San Francisco hotel on Nob Hill in 1945 before Nixon vanishes into history as well, only to reappear a decade later as a historical figure. One phantom who shadows the story every step is a triple agent from Stalin's Russia, named Jaguar, who happens to not only be a spy, a murderer, and an assassin, but a scholar of poetry and philosophy. He sparred with Tim Nordhall, stealthily followed the U-234 atomic bomb material from New Hampshire to San Francisco in 1945, and ultimately held Tim Nordhall's fate in his hands. By extension, he holds the truth to Marianne's mission in his heart as well. Like all classic espionage suspense stories, and historical novels, this yesterday thriller operates at will through cities of fog and drizzle, jungles filled with uranium mines and mercenaries, and shores of seas illumined by galaxies of starlight. The enigmatic truth lies with a small girl, holding her mother's hand on a beach in Siberia, looking east toward another beach in San Francisco half a century later, where a graying French countess stands looking westward to her own past and her own self as a tiny child. The yawning chasm remains as dark and void as her questions, of which at least the most important two are answered when she learns the truth about her mother and father. And that is enough for any lifetime.
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