The Art Procurer follows the parallel lives of an SS colonel, Rainer Zeitz, whose assignment is to confiscate art from occupied countries and that of an American art professor, Martin Wynerson, whose assignment will be to recover such art post-war. The wartime life of each is complicated by a strong-willed, loving female relative. In Zeitz's case his sly, manipulative cousin, Anna; for Wynerson it is his younger sister, Madeleine. Adding to the mix, Wynerson takes his absent boss's wife for a mistress. Zeitz's and Wynerson's lives intersect at last in post-war Munich and the fate of several...

Two weeks after Charles Ogilvy, a highly successful post-WWII Southern California real estate developer and soon-to-be candidate for lieutenant governor, is found dead in his home near Santa Julietta, his wife, Margaret, hires Stu Fletcher to find Charles's three-decades-missing sister, Bernice, who apparently -- out of the blue -- sent Charles a postcard postmarked in San Jose shortly before he died. Next to the postcard Margaret found a note in Charles's handwriting reading: Find Bern. Must apologize. Margaret presumes the postcard is the key to her husband's shocking suicide. The twisted,...