Checking on an apparent runaway case, Brussels-based Inspector Henri Castang learns the missing boy's identity and his connection to a former SS officer, prompting Castang to launch a full-scale kidnapping investigation.

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In his latest case, Brussels' Henri Castang (Love in Amsterdam et al.), once a policeman but now an "Advisory Expert on criminology" in the vast bureaucracy of the European Community, agrees to investigate the disappearance of Anita and Arnold Rogier's son, Maurice, kidnapped four years ago, when he was eight years old. Mme. Rogier insists she has just received a call from her son, but few believe her. Castang's search leads him and his wife, Vera, born in Czechoslovakia, first to Mme. Rogier's father, an SS officer during WWII, and then to Bohemia, in the Czech Republic, where the past catches up with the present. In the end, the motivation for the kidnapping is unclear, and a leap from that crime to another is too great. Although Freeling touches on some of the ironies of post-Cold War Europe, this tale, shifting point of view between past and present, lacks a clear focus. The result is that Castang's wry, dark musings, even against the backdrop of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (as indicated in the title), spread a murky fog over events rather than cast their usual revealing sidelight.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Henri Castang, former French police commissaire turned Brussels bureaucrat, is not averse to playing sleuth if the case offers a respite from his usual desk jockey^-paperwork routine. When the wealthy Madame Rogier appears in his office, swearing she's had a telephone call from her young son, who was kidnapped four years ago and is presumed dead by the baffled police, Castang is at first skeptical but soon becomes intrigued--by Madame Rogier; her wheelchair-bound husband; her father, a former Nazi sympathizer; and the odd circumstances of the kidnapping. Nothing will do but for Castang to go poking about in the Rogier family's past, which means trekking off to Bohemia and Copenhagen on a case that becomes more mysterious and complex by the day. While the plot is tre{�}s intriguing, it is Castang, full of Gaelic charm, wry humor, and long-suffering patience with the vagaries of life, and bearing more than a passing resemblance to that beloved British barrister Rumpole, who makes this lively adventure, the latest in a long-running series, such a delight. Emily Melton

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