His Father's House

Despite merely workmanlike prose, Meador's suspenseful debut novel ingeniously melds adventure, Cold War politics, a love story and a search for roots. Looking through his deceased father's effects, law professor Rob Kirkman finds a photograph of a young woman. Stashed alongside is his father's journal, and, reading it, Rob learns that the picture was taken off a dying German soldier in WWI. Rob sets off from Alabama in 1973 to Communist East Germany in search of his father's past, locates the woman, a now-elderly baroness, and becomes ensnared in an intricate political, romantic and familial web centered around Maria Egloffsberg, who claims to be the baroness's granddaughter. Maria enlists Rob in a plot to smuggle Bibles into East Germany, but even as he falls for her, he suspects that she's a Communist spy bent on infiltrating a secret Protestant organization dedicated to reuniting Germany. Rob is jolted out of his ruminations on modern German history by his discovery that one of his relatives, a German chemical engineer, was convicted of war crimes. Meador, a University of Virginia law professor who is legally blind, offers exceptional insight into the worlds of both the blind and the sighted through his treatment of the baroness's blind son Wolfgang, who may be a double agent. Although this first novelist tends to ``tell'' rather than ``show,'' his robust story crackles with intrigue while resonating with implicit moral values. Author tour. (Sept.)