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What would you do if you discovered a lost masterpiece that revealed the artist’s extreme prejudice? Or survived a war only to find yourself participating in political violence?

Ethical dilemmas and twists and turns of Jewish history are at the core of two new novels by Lauren Belfer and Stewart O’Nan. 

Belfer’s sprawling novel And After the Fire spans two continents and several centuries and concerns a fictional music manuscript. It opens as an American soldier in Weimar grabs some sheet music to take home as a souvenir. After his death decades later, his niece, Susanna Kessler, discovers a cryptic note and what appears to be an unknown Bach cantata: one with lyrics influenced by an anti-Semitic sermon. Susanna must weigh the pros and cons of publicizing a work whose contents, by any standard, are offensive. Her epic search for the manuscript’s original owners leads her from New York’s rare book libraries to present-day Germany. She also encounters two historians who vie for the manuscript—as well as her romantic attentions.

Susanna’s journey is interspersed with the history of the manuscript itself. Originally a gift from Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedrich to his most talented pupil, Sara Itzig Levy, the cantata remained in the Levy family’s hands over many turbulent decades. Though the manuscript is a fiction, Levy is not: The daughter of a prominent Jewish banker, she was the aunt of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn and at the forefront of salon culture during the Enlightenment.

And After the Fire is sprinkled with other real-life historical figures, and Belfer is adept at revealing the complex politics and sentiments, including the religious biases, of 18th-century Europe. The important questions Belfer poses regarding the ethical complexities of art are engrossing, though her characters never come fully to life. 

Stewart O’Nan’s gripping City of Secrets is also a moral thriller, but on a much different scale. It is tightly focused in time and place; the action takes place over the winter of 1946 and follows a handful of post-World War II refugees fighting for the creation of Israel against both Arab attack and Britain’s mandates. Recalling the novels of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, City of Secrets has a taut, noir-like flavor. Like O’Nan’s earlier novels, it features a displaced hero who, despite everything, still believes his life has purpose. 

City of Secrets follows Brand, a Latvian whose mechanical skills allowed him to survive the death camps, though he lost everything else. Brand slipped easily into Jerusalem, his new identity and job provided by the Jewish underground. Spending his days as a taxi driver taking tourists to religious sites, he remains loyal to the members of his Haganah cell, accepting missions that grow ever more dangerous under the cell’s elusive leader, Asher. By the time Brand realizes what’s at stake, it is almost too late. 

These compelling stories use history as a lens to examine issues that are still with us today.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Marriage is a challenge under the best of circumstances—devoting your life to one person for all of eternity, through better or worse, richer or poorer, driving through Midwestern storms and facing your husband’s mistress in a foreign country.

OK, those last two examples aren’t found in most wedding vows. But they are found in two new books that examine the darker corners of marriage. Call it the domestic suspense genre.

In Siracusa, the incomparable Delia Ephron introduces us to couples Michael and Lizzie and Finn and Taylor. The foursome is traveling to Italy together, along with Finn and Taylor’s precocious daughter, Snow. These people, it must be said, have absolutely no business traveling together. 

Michael, a semi-famous playwright who has struggled to recapture the magic of his early professional success, has been cheating on Lizzie with a waitress. Finn and Taylor barely speak other than to argue about Snow, an impressionable preteen who idolizes Michael. Finn and Lizzie, who used to date, still have an undeniable spark. Meanwhile, Michael tries to hide the fact that the woman he’s sleeping with has unexpectedly turned up at their hotel in the rundown Sicilian town of Siracusa.

Add a whole lot of Italian wine to the inevitable illicit sex and bitter secrets, and a recipe for the perfect vacation this is not. When Snow goes missing, the families reach their boiling point, and harsh, irreversible truths emerge. This is a thrilling, perfectly paced and deeply satisfying read by a masterful writer.

Listen to Me is a much quieter—but no less impactful—book by the acclaimed author of Reunion and The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard. Laced with dreadful anticipation, Listen to Me is a spot-on depiction of the creep factor of road trips, with their desolate rest stops and weird encounters with strangers. 

Mark and Maggie are driving from their Chicago home to his parents’ Virginia farm. Maggie was recently attacked on the street near their home, the butt of a gun to the back of her head leaving her unconscious and with lingering psychological trauma. She finds herself withdrawn from her life as a wife and veterinarian, reading the news online, compulsively seeking the worst in her fellow humans. Mark struggles to be patient with Maggie’s recovery, and to resist the furtive email come-ons from his lovely teaching assistant who seems so, well, normal in comparison to his damaged wife. 

The road trip is meant to help them reconnect. They don’t realize when they hit the road that they’re driving straight into a powerful storm slicing its way through the Midwest. When the couple hits a total blackout in West Virginia, they hunker down for the night in a remote hotel. Mark takes their dog out for a pre-dawn walk, and a parking lot confrontation turns ugly, forcing Maggie to reckon with her own deep-seated fears.

As Pittard writes, evil—sometimes anonymous, sometimes known—not only exists, it thrives. Both books are gorgeously written sketches of marriages gone sour, and reminders that sometimes the scariest bogeymen are the ones in our own minds.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

Whatever one may think of politics, one has to concede that elections provide juicy material for works of fiction. Two new novels offer very different portraits of modern politics, yet share common traits, including an insider’s view of the political process and sacrifices required in the quest for power.

The feistier of the two novels is The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear, by Stuart Stevens, a political consultant who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. The Dow has plummeted, and the government has divided Google into separate companies. When the incumbent Republican president chooses not to seek re-election, two candidates vie to replace him: Hilda Smith, the sitting vice-president, and Armstrong George, the fire-breathing Colorado governor who—sound familiar?—wants to build a large security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The narrator is J.D. Callahan, Smith’s campaign manager, who hopes a Smith victory will help him become a pundit with his own TV show. First, however, he has to get through the GOP convention, which, coincidentally, is in Callahan’s native New Orleans. His job is complicated, however, by his two half-brothers: one a former felon who wants financial help for his run for public office, and the other a neo-Nazi who owns a strip club and may be responsible for bombs that have imperiled the convention. The humor may be too broad for some readers, but this funny, fast-paced novel offers a perspective that only a seasoned campaign strategist like Stevens could provide.

Jennifer Close’s latest, The Hopefuls, set during the first six years of the Obama administration, is a more somber affair. Beth, our narrator, moves from her beloved New York to D.C. so her husband, Matt, can pursue his dream of entering politics. (Close moved to D.C. with her own husband, who also worked on the Obama campaign.)

Shortly after their arrival, Matt and Beth meet Jimmy Dillon, who works in the White House travel office, and his wife, Ashleigh, a Texas gal who tells Beth minutes after meeting her, “I can just tell we’re going to be best friends.”

The couples grow close, but Matt soon becomes jealous of Jimmy’s more exciting job, with duties that include flying to Hawaii to perform advance work for the Obamas’ vacation and playing golf with the President. After Obama’s re-election, Jimmy moves to Texas with Ashleigh to run for railroad commissioner and asks Matt to manage his campaign. But the campaign puts a strain on both marriages, especially when Jimmy starts spending time alone with Beth. 

Unlike Stevens’ book, The Hopefuls focuses on a retail form of politics: going door-to-door, attending church picnics, canvassing for votes. Yet both novels entertain with keenly observed inner-circle perspectives and shrewd insight into how personal politics can become.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.