A slightly dreamy, romantic cover belied the content of this book.

The central character is a young woman who has been disfigured in a car accident which killed her mother. Suffering from guilt, she attends a grief counselling class and befriends an elderly gentleman. He confesses to her that he was an SS officer in Germany in the war and wants her to kill him.

The woman informs the authorities about the officer and then gets involved in the investigation seeking to prove that the man is in fact a war criminal. She is torn between wanting to help him die and wanting to see him tried for his crimes.

Then there is the woman's grandmother. She was a Jew and experienced the concentration camps. Her story is told in the first person and makes up at least a third of the book, in one long chapterless narrative. The tone and thrust of the book changes completely here. Picoult is a masterful storyteller, so one tale is not stronger than the other, but it feels as though she is frightened of doing anything other than tell the story of the suffering the Jews experienced. The structure of the book seems clumsy.

We are returned to the present day and the young woman is forced to decide what to do about the German. There is a twist at the end, but the dilemma of how to forgive, how much someone should pay for the crimes of the past, whether we can punish or forgive people on behalf of others and so on - all this is handled too quickly, ultimately, for me.

I have only read 'My Sister's Keeper' of Picoult's other books and I remember that for handling the grey area of morality/ethics incredibly well. This book disappointed me. I think it was trying to do too much and the author was afraid to handle the subject matter differently. The author's notes, where she relays something of what Jewish survivors told her of their experiences, was shocking.