Books: 791

“The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections 1939-1945”
Rose Valland
Laurel Publishers, LLC
$45

Unobtrusive Rose Valland spent a good part of her life flying beneath the radar. She became quite adept at it, hiding her spying from the Nazis and her gayness and her life partner from the world in general. She continued working unpaid in the Jeu de Paume Museum after the Germans took Paris in 1940. They used the museum as a way station for looted art, unaware that Valland spoke fluent German and was keeping meticulous notes on the provenance and destinations of thousands of canvases, sculptures, jewelry and tapestries stolen from Jewish families. In her lowly capacity, she enabled the Monuments Men and Women post-war to retrieve and return thousands of France’s art patrimony. This English translation, footnoted, is of Valland’s own manuscript, first published in 1961.

“Where the Nights Smell Like Bread”
Glen Peters
Rattling Good Yarns
$18.95

The novel’s evocative title will draw you in, and Peters’s prose will sustain you throughout this tale of love and loss and love again. After all, most of our histories of sadness, loss and longing are pretty ho-hum to those who are not suffering them or others cocooned in their own singular sorrows. Mark Anello, a 34-year-old math teacher dumped by his boyfriend, flees the short hop from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where he’s smitten by Italian tourist Allesandro, himself distressed. After some months of correspondence, Mark follows him to Rome. Three summers later, and Allesandro’s flame is now an ember. Alone, despairing, Mark makes even worse choices before realizing that other nights in more familiar climes have their own seductive perfumes.

“Mirage City: An Evander Mills Mystery”
Lev AC Rosen
Minotaur
$28

San Francisco, 1953, on the cusp of PI Andy Mills’ 37th birthday. Fans of his three earlier adventures, “Lavender House,” “The Bell in the Fog” and “Rough Pages,” will want to join the celebration. A member of the local Mattachine Society, fearing foul play, hires Mills to find three “disappeared” members. The road leads away from boyfriend Gene — and the upcoming (unwanted) birthday party — back to Los Angeles, whence he’d fled, and … closer to his mom, whom he hasn’t seen in years. Something is amiss in La-La land, much more than dreamed; motorcycle gangs and unscrupulous doctors “curing” sinful deviants, with Mom on center stage. Nothing in Andy’s life is ever so bad that it can’t be made worse, and Rosen is a master at tightening the screws.

“The Book of I”
David Greig
Europa
$24

 “I” here represents not ego-I, but the remote island of Iona. It’s 825, and this monks’ isle, decimated by northern pillagers, is left with three inhabitants: young Brother Martin (in the outhouse at the attack), Una, a now-widowed beekeeper, and Grimur, the attacker who widowed her, but, thought dead, was deposited by his compatriots in a hastily-covered shallow grave. A kind of waiting for Godot scenario ensues, only Viking Godots always return — for more spoils — in this case, seeking a missing reliquary. The three remaining pursue survival, interrupted by a young woman come ashore seeking a sequestered life. You sense trouble? You’re correct. Death, insanity, fire, that sort of thing, but Grieg deftly handles the past while relating it to the future — to the present.