The Monkey Dance

This suspense novel, alternately set in a northern California university community and in major cities of Europe, chronicles the efforts of Harry Packer to excise a guilt that has been eating at his conscience for over thirty years. While a young American cell leader in the French Resistance during World War II, he secretly executed a fellow Resistance worker who he believed had betrayed their unit to the Gestapo. Evidence later confirmed he had killed an innocent man. For thirty-three years he had looked for a way to redeem himself for this fatal error in judgment. Then, in 1976, an opportunity seems to arise for him to do, so - by identifying and bringing to justice an unknown murderer he is convinced is also a Nazi war criminal living incognito in the United States. Complications develop when his quarry turns out also to be a Soviet KGB mole.

Michele Shover, who was born and raised in Iowa, is on the faculty of California State University, Chico, California, where she has been Professor of Political Science since 1968. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Arizona, Tempe, and her doctorate at Tulane University, New Orleans. She served as chair of her department in the 1970s. She has published extensively, principally in the field of local history, and has a forthcoming book on Indian/settler relations in northern California in the 1850s and 1860s.