The Tenth Witness
by Leonard Rosen
The Permanent Press
Reviewed by Karl Wolff

“I begin, therefore, as I have for thirty years: with the body of a man floating face down in the slack water of Terschelling Island.” Henri Poincare, the narrator, continues, “And the world is well rid of him.” The body's identity and how Henri comes about to justify this homicide will propel The Tenth Witness forward. Beginning off the Dutch coast in late spring 1978, Henri Poincare and his fellow engineer Alec Chin are set to salvage the HMS Lutine. The Lutine sank off the coast in 1799, laden with tons of gold. But before Henri begins work on the salvaging operation, he decides to take a short vacation by hiking across the mud flats of the Wadden Sea. His guide is Liesel Kraus, an athletic beauty with a troubling past.

As Henri finds himself falling in love with Liesel, he decides to investigate the Kraus family. Liesel gives Henri a copy of a biography of Otto von Kraus, the patriarch of the family and mastermind behind Kraus Steel. The current head of Kraus Steel is Liesel's brother Anselm. What confounds Henri is how the Kraus family acquired (or preserved?) its wealth. According to the biography of Otto von Kraus, he was a member in good standing of the Nazi Party. He used slave labor, but was exonerated from prosecution of war crimes due to the positive testimonies of ten witnesses. This strikes a nerve with Henri, since his uncle was Jewish and he understands the evil perpetrated by the Nazi regime, even if the Kraus family wants to whitewash it.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, Henri attempts to meet the surviving witnesses. Except the witnesses he plans to meet end up dying in dubious circumstances.

The convenient deaths occur at the same time Anselm woos Henri into working as a consultant for Kraus Steel. He takes Henri to a ship-breaking yard in India. While Anselm sees the unsafe conditions as just another line on a budget ledger, the ship-breaking yard horrifies Henri. He also sees parallels between the ship-breaking yard and Nazi slave labor. (And a delightful example to bring up to opponents of raising the American minimum wage.) Anselm recruited Henri's talents because he wants Henri to come up with a process for salvaging computers and other electronic equipment. After a near fatal accident in the lab working on an electronics salvaging process, Henri has to face some tough choices. The trouble continues to mount as Anselm's recruitment techniques turn into strong arm tactics and the biography Liesel gave to Henri becomes less and less credible. Henri's torturous conflicts with the family business and his love for Liesel draw him deeper and deeper into corporate corruption and a race hatred he's finding everywhere, even within himself.

The Tenth Witness is a prequel to Leonard Rosen's critically acclaimed and Macavity Award-winning first novel, All Cry Chaos. Why did I give the novel a perfect 10? It is a combination of the excellent writing, compelling characters, and its tapestry of histories. It weaves together the history of the HMS Lutine, the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the Seventies. Histories reflect and refract off other histories, putting the novel in the category of Seventies Eurothrillers with Nazi villains (think Marathon Man and more tangentially, The Night Porter). In the Sixties and Seventies, the German population wanted to sweep the Nazi war crimes under the carpet and just get along with their lives. At least that's what the parents told their children who now asked that tricky question, “Grandpa, what did you do during the War?” It also brings to light the criminal atrocities done in the name of saving a nickel like ship-breaking by an indentured worker class and our current practice of recycling electronics in a less than healthful manner. But who cares about them? Buy that new iPhone that's a quarter inch thinner and forget where the last one went … or what it is doing to the worker's eyes and lungs.

Leonard Rosen ties together all these disparate narrative strands in a book less than 300 pages long. The various histories and personalities melded together seamlessly, reminding me of the baroque complexity of Alan Moore's Watchmen. It is a stunning achievement.

Out of 10/10

https://driftlessareareview.com/2014/02/21/cclap-fridays-the-tenth-witness-by-le... ( )

Looks like the only other reviewers got a free book in exchange. I paid for my copy. And am not disappointed that I did either.

I did read the first book when it came out, so this prequel was not my first introduction to Henri. I have to admit I was lost at the start of the book because it was very difficult to bring my head back to Henri's past when it was so different from the present day story I had liked so much. Normally I don't like historical fiction, and this book did brush right along the edge of that (i.e. Nazi war crimes)... I read fiction for escapes from reality, not to recap the horrendous activities humans have gotten up to in the past. And I like justice that is meaningful (i.e. the bad guys get their just desserts asap after they commit their crimes)... in fact, I like vigilante justice where bad guys get their just desserts immediately. To read about Nazi crimes where most of the murderers got away and/or were brought to justice after they had lived the better parts of their lives free is just not satisfying. So they convict an 80 year old of war crimes - so what, he already lived the best part of his life off the backs of the people he murdered.

Okay, okay... rant over... anyway, it was a good story and I like Henri's character. He is a noir kinda guy and believes that justice might have to come outside the box. I will read more in this series, even if it were set in the past.

I requested this book from the Library Thing Early Reviewers program because I was intrigued by the promo story involving recovery of a treasure ship of the Dutch Coast. That was only a minor part of the story, though important, and I found myself enjoying the book in spite of it taking off in rather different directions. Henri Poincare is a creative engineer, who finds himself caught up in a German family business and complex history of the business and his own family and friends in and after WWII. It started a bit slow, but builds to hold the readers interest to an exciting end. It is a prequel to the author's first novel which I plan to search out and read. ( )

Knowing nothing about this author and having read no reviews, I dove in with no expectations. I was engrossed right away and finished the book the same day. The impetus for Henri Poincare to leave the engineering business he is building and eventually become an Interpol agent, is his growing moral dilemma about and research in to the family of a women with whom he is falling in love. The details about the salvaging of a treasure ship and the growth of a successful business are great, but it is the historical background about the Holocaust, and the roles that were played by the family members that drives the story. In a way, this story reminds me of a protagonist in a Dick Francis novel, a rather quiet, unassuming man faces great fear and danger and grows in ability and moral certitude. This is much more literary but with no less tension and suspense. The writing was very good and I look forward to more by this author. ( )

This novel is the second in the Henri Poincare series, but chronologically takes us back to the time when Henri turned professionally from being an engineer to becoming an Interpol investigator. In the 1970s he and a business partner have secured a contract to recover a tresure lost centuries ago when a ship sank, taking a load of gold with it. After building a complex platform in the North Sea to serve as a staging ground for the recovery of the treasure, Henri is approached by the young scion of a family whose fortune was built on German steel. Unlike other industrial giants whose collaborarion with the Nazi war machine cost their reputations and fortunes, the Nazi-era head of the family was known as a kind of Schindler who had a slave labor camp located at his steel mill but who managed to subvert the system and rescue countless Jews.

Henri, who is deeply in love with the Schindler-like industry mogul's granddaughter, is persuaded to take on a complicated job - developing a system for extracting gold from discarded computer components. Though this project comes at the very beginnings of the personal computer era, the head of the company is convinced this will one day be immenselfy profitable and wants to get in on the ground floor. Henri is intrigued, but troubled by the danger that any such process might pose for workers - and disturbed by the fact that the corporations many holdings include operations in developing countries that put workers in harm's way for very little pay. But things are even more complicated than he thought. He begins to wonder whether the concentration camp survivors who attested to the good character of the war-era plant leader were coerced. One by one, they are dying under suspicious circumstances.

Leonard Rosen's style is interesting. Though his material - Nazi gold! Sunken treausre! Secrets hidden in archives! - sounds like the ingredients for a paint-by-number thriller, he handles it in a way that takes the reality on which his story is based much too seriously to turn it into pure entertainment. The parallel he draws between Nazi racism and first world uses of third world labor is thought-provoking. The ethical dilemma that Henri's romantic partner faces - using family weath for good causes in order to make up for the environmental and social problems the company causes - is complex and not simple to resolve. Rosen's writing style is also far from the usual thriller page-turner style. There's something of the 19th century novel of ideas at work in these books. Henri's narration is intelligent and courtly, emotional but in an almost scholarly way. An example, chosen at random: "The documents I had copied were singeing my fingertips. In them was evidence of crimes so horrible that I felt, on leaving the archive, that I was carrying some dread virus into an unsuspecting world." It seems almost like something a Jules Verne hero might say.

In short, it's a novel that takes on big ideas and big ethical dilemmas and includes a lot of drama, but without the rip-roaring page-turning style that is common in stories that have chapters that never go beyond one scene or three pages, whichever comes first. It has a slow fuse but eventually the plot takes off and our hero has trials to face and historical atrocities to confront that are as momentous as those in any thriller though without ever making use of historical atrocities for pure entertainment.