A City of Broken Glass

The opening of Cantrell’s gripping fourth novel featuring journalist Hannah Vogel (after 2011’s A Game of Lies) finds Vogel and her 13-year-old son, Anton, in 1938 Poland, where her newspaper has sent her to do a light feature piece on the St. Martin’s Day festival held every November 11 in Poznan. Having learned from the morning newspapers that Germany is deporting more than 12,000 Polish Jews across the border, Hannah decides to travel to a nearby town to investigate. There in a stable full of refugees Hannah encounters a pregnant woman she knows, Miriam Keller, who tells Hannah she has left her two-year-old daughter, Ruth, behind in Berlin. The reporter risks her life and that of her son’s in a heroic effort to locate Ruth. While the characterizations and period detail don’t match those of a first-rank author in the subgenre like Alan Furst, Cantrell poignantly conveys the plight of Nazi Germany’s Jews through the story of one child. Agent: Elizabeth Evans, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency. (July)