Balson has written 5 books so far and all in one series. I saw today that he’d just released another one so I figured I’d better catch up with the one I’d missed, Karolina’s Twins. It’s number three in the series which I missed because the sample in the Audio version was not what I wanted to read. But …

The stories in this series are individual enough they can be read as standalone, but there is a very loose overacting continuity dealing with the informal team of Liam Taggart a private detective and Catherine Taggart, a Chicago-based attorney.

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Karolina’s Twins
by Ronald H. Bolson
2010 / 317 pages
read by Gabra Zackman
rating – B/7 – legal crime – holocaust lit
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One day Liam receives a phone call from, Lena Scheinman. an elderly woman who wants to hire him and Catherine to help sort out what she describes as a real estate problem. She calls him because of a prior case (Book 2) where the client was an old friend of Lena’s.

When they meet the next day she barely begins to tell Catherine the long story, only hinted at in her diary, of her friend Karolina and her twin daughters, lost in the Holocaust of WWII. This was 70 years prior and it takes days to tell. She has a book with

Bottom line, in order to settle the real estate issue she has to prove that although she’s in her 90s, she hasn’t got dementia and incompetent as her son claims. But this is 70 years after the facts in the US. She wants to find the twins because of a promise.

I suppose it’s a good book but I was kind of disappointed through most of it. It doesn’t seem as original as her priors. That said the ending is page-turning and I’m going to go ahead and read The Girl From Berlin, Balson’s 5th book.