Bloodlines - Hardcover

In his timely, suspenseful and historically detailed novel, Ducker (Lead Us Not into Penn Station) brings together the worlds of contemporary Swiss banking and wartime Europe. In 1943, Hermann Steinmuller, a Swiss Jew, bankrolls an unseaworthy boat to take Jewish refugees from Budapest to Palestine. The boat sinks off the coast of Turkey, drowning Hermann and all the passengers. Flash forward to 1997. Peter Steinmuller is an American jazz keyboard player in a band that is fired by the cruise ship director when they arrive in Europe. Looking for work, he goes to Geneva, where, serendipitously, he comes upon an advertisement for the heirs of his grandfather Hermann's brother, Pietr. With the help of a quietly beautiful bank officer, Helene Durren, with whom he is soon intimate, he receives the proceeds of the account, a paltry 336 francs. He discovers, however, that the original account held 114,000 francs, most of which has been withdrawn by its trustee, Frederich Von Egger, a distinguished aristocrat and a pillar of rectitude active in humanitarian causes. When Peter goes to Von Egger's palatial estate and confronts him with his questions, Von Egger not only convinces Peter of the morality of his transactions with the account, but tells him that he and Pietr Steinmuller nobly helped Jews funnel their wealth out of Nazi hands. Helene, however, suspects that, far from helping fleeing Jews, Von Egger and Pietr Steinmuller were fleecing them. Peter sets off for Central Europe to track down the people whose names are on the old accounts for which Von Egger is trustee. The possible fraudulence of Von Egger's story becomes entangled with the question of whether Peter's grandfather is the heroic Hermann or the unscrupulous, anti-Semitic Pietr. By the time Peter unravels the mystery, readers have learned about the nefarious dealings of people who profited from the Holocaust. And although Ducker's prose sometimes lacks vibrancy, he deftly interpolates background material about jazz and neatly evokes such settings as Geneva and Budapest. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ducker's sixth novel (And Lead Us Not into Penn Station, 1994, etc.) spins an intensely revealing fable out of today's headlines in this story of a young American in pursuit of his family's ties to Swiss bank accounts looted from Holocaust victims. Bereft of his jazz piano gig and his stateside girlfriend, Peter Steinmuller seizes on his name in a Zurich newspaper as the portal to an enchanted world. The Lwenhoft Handelsbank is seeking depositors or their heirs to claim funds left with the bank during the dark hours of the war 50 years earlier. Once Peter's filled out the stack of paperwork required to claim the money in his eponymous grandfather's account, though, he's amazed to find that the balance, after a series of payments authorized by the trustee, is only a few hundred dollarsless than he owes the lawyer who's prepared his claim. Assistant bank manager Helene Durren can't help him track down the trustee, she insists, though she does end up warming his bed. And the trustee, enigmatic business titan Frederic Von Egger, can't help him either, except to the extent of offering him his friendship, the hospitality of his estate, and what amounts to the original balance in the account (something over $90,000) if only he'll leave the country for good. Instead of accepting this apparently generous offer, Peter, in the tradition of every self-respecting fairy-tale hero with ``no languages, no contacts, no training,'' vows to ferret out every last secret of the account, even if it means digging up unsuspected family skeletons and linking his grandfather's account to an awful lot of other missing money. Arranging to have every door open as if by magic at Peter's touch, Ducker provides a rising spiral of thrills without the familiar trappings of melodrama in his best novel yet. (Film rights to Doorbell Productions) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.