Wartime jewel thief's story a fab summer read
Its author, Florida-based Kristin Harmel, is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen novels translated into more than 30 languages. Her latest is part historical fiction, part mystery, part romance and part family saga. It delves into the lingering grief from the Nazi occupation of Paris during the Second World War through the lives of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and of former French Resistance members.
When the novel opens in 2018, Colette Marceau is an 89-year-old retired librarian living in Boston, and still active in her calling as a jewel thief. The last known descendant of Robin Hood, she was raised by her mother since the age of six to see stealing as her destiny.
The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
The family code requires she steal only from people who are evil or corrupt — in this case, Nazis and neo-Nazis — and that she must use all the money to do good in the world. As a teenager, Colette's thefts supported the French Resistance in purchasing safe passage for Jews in hiding, and as an adult, she is an anonymous patron of numerous charities, most notably the Boston Holocaust Education Centre.
However, all is not well with Colette — her life is 'stolen' both in the sense that she has spent it stealing, and that a normal childhood and family life has been stolen from her by the war.
She is haunted by her memories of her childhood in Paris, where she was raised as the daughter of an English mother and French father. During the Second World War, she lost her mother, her sister, her mother's Jewish friend and the Jewish boy she loved, as well as her father having abandoned her. As a result, she found herself too emotionally damaged to marry or have children, which she now regrets, though she does have a surrogate daughter, Aviva, who she took into her home when she was orphaned at 18.
Colette has in her possession half of a stunning divisible diamond bracelet that was created especially for her mother's Jewish friend, Hélène Rosman, to celebrate the birth of her twins. When Hélène was arrested by the Nazis, they took the bracelet from her, but Colette's mother stole it back, intending to return it to her friend after the war. She hid half of it on Colette's person and half on the person of Colette's sister, Liliane, but that half disappeared when Liliane was murdered. Hélène subsequently perished at Auschwitz.
In 2018, the other half of the bracelet surfaces in an exhibition in Boston, loaned by an anonymous donor, and this sets in motion Colette's quest to learn the donor's identity and thereby also discover who killed her sister.
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The novel switches between 2018 and 1940s France, showing the devastation caused by Nazis and those who collaborated with them. Harmel delves into the moral complexity of those tasked with upholding standards and serving the public (police officers, schoolteachers) who instead support and do evil, while those deemed to be wrongdoers — thieves — are the characters who stand for goodness and have principles.
Colette and her eventual romantic partner, Daniel, are refreshing to read as older characters around the age of 90 who are not stereotypes — rather, they are full and nuanced personalities who fall in love and experience passion. They use cell phones with ease, live independent, full lives and take centre stage in their own story, though they also feel their mortality, regret aspects of their pasts and use their age when convenient to avoid certain tasks.
The novel is fast moving and well-paced, with the 1940s and 2018 sections holding equal interest. The clues to the history of the bracelet unfold along with two budding romances — those of both Colette and Aviva.
The way things wrap up is perhaps a little too convenient, coming by way of a series of large coincidences, with the last reveal apparent several chapters earlier, but it will satisfy those readers who crave a happy ending.
Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg-based writer of short and long fiction. Her debut novel The World So Wide was published in April.
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