It had been love at first sight when Sonja Dahlberg and Viktor Bjornsen met in Norway. But two days after they married in 1940, German forces swept into the country and occupied their town. He was a local police officer, forced to cooperate with the invaders. When the war and the occupation ended, they decided to leave the horrible events behind and get a new start in America.

The story opens ten years later, in 1955, on the farm they had hacked from the dense forest on an island in Puget Sound near Seattle. Sonja is nervously picking up the telephone to call the sheriff. Viktor is...