Hidden histories

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/03/2024 (646 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In Robert Rotenberg’s What We Buried, homicide detective Daniel Kennicott is walking to his quiet Toronto home when he’s ambushed by the requisite people in black cars with tinted windows and left lying shot, in critical condition, on his own doorstep.

Sure, it could be retribution from any one of the umpteen murders he’s worked, but then, he’s just returned from the same Italian village his brother Michael was about to visit when he was gunned down in front of a spiffy restaurant in Yorkville a decade ago — prompting Daniel to give up corporate law and become a cop.

Both men had asked uncomfortable questions about their parents’ deaths — killed by a drunk driver as they drove to their cottage north of Toronto.

One of the local cops in cottage country believed their deaths were more than just a tragic consequence of the town drunk getting behind the wheel — she suspected a deliberate hit, but was overruled and had her career derailed by the area Crown attorney who cut a deal for impaired driving causing death that she didn’t have to make.

That Crown? She’s now a judge. Is your spidey sense tingling?

Wise, kind and doggedly determined Ari Greene was the homicide detective leaning over Michael’s bleeding body when Daniel rushed to the scene in Yorkville and now, as head of homicide, he’s mentored Daniel’s police career. Could it be that Greene and Toronto police chief Nora Bering have been taking a keen but quiet interest in the deaths of Daniel’s family? You think?

And that tiny mountaintop Italian village?

Gubbio is real and it’s where the Nazi SS massacred 40 men in retaliation for an attack by resistance fighters that killed an officer and wounded a soldier.

We’ve met a lot of these people before in Toronto murder mysteries by Rotenberg, a criminal defence lawyer, but he doles out just enough backstory that What We Buried can be read as a standalone novel.

And what a good one too.

While What We Buried is a superb whodunit, it’s also a tale of family secrets and family beliefs.

The obvious problem about linking a contemporary murder to the Second World War is that anyone who even turned 18 on the last day of the war would now be closing in on 97 years old. Odds are exceptionally slim that anyone who took any part in the Gubbio massacre is still alive.

But memories are long and so can be the thirst for justice. A child, a grandchild — can they be held responsible as adults for evil committed by a grandparent before they were born? What if they share the beliefs that made their grandparent a monster and keep them hidden? How far would they go?

We have herein one family whose grandparents were British codebreakers and an RAF tailgunner on one side, and on the other — hmm, not all that much is known.

There’s a gentle, sweet old man who’s never talked before about surviving the Holocaust — or what he did after the war.

There’s Canadian history here too — about how many Germans were imprisoned here during the war and how many Nazis were among them. History about how many of those POWs never went back home after the war — POWs who maybe changed their names and identities.

Enough of that, lest we venture too close to a spoiler.

What We Buried is a terrific read, with some fabulous secondary characters.

Your book club may want to ask each other: how well do you know your grandparents?

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin could never afford as a young fellow to eat in Yorkville — he couldn’t even meet the standard to window shop.