When We Meet Again, by Kristin Harmel

"When We Meet Again," is much more than romantic novel. I read this book in one sitting because I was captured by Kristen Harmel's profound story telling ability and exquisite use of words. The protagonist in the novel, Emily Emerson, has lost her job as a syndicated relationship columnist at a local newspaper. Daily, she deals with the pain of her father's abandonment of the family when Emily was eleven. Her father also deals with the pain of abandonment, since he never knew his father. His mother, Emily's grandmother, Margaret Emerson, raised him alone. After Emily's mother died when Emily was 16, Margaret also raised Emily.

Now in her mid-thirties, Emily refuses her father's attempt to reestablish a relationship, and her anger at him is palpable. Her anger is mixed with her grief over Margaret's recent death, and her constant pain over giving her baby up for adoption when she was 18.

Out of the blue, a beautiful painting is sent to Emily from an art gallery in Munich. It is of a woman in a red dress in a field of sugar cane. The sky is a gorgeous violet. A note accompanies the painting. It says, "your grandfather never stopped loving her. Margaret was the love of his life." The mystery of this painting sends Emily to the former German POW camps near Lake Okeechobee, Florida, and to her grandmother's hometown in Belle Creek, Florida. There she learns that over 400,000 captured German soldiers were sent to POW camps across the U.S. in order to fill the labor shortage caused by World War II. Unlike the Nazis, the U.S. complied with the Geneva Convention, and treated the POWs well. Near Lake Okeechobee, the POWs harvested the sugar cane fields, and it is there that POW Peter Dahler met Margaret and fell in love. Emily also learns that her grandmother's family disowned her when she became pregnant with Peter's baby. Driven by the need to solve the mystery of the painting and the mystery of the disappeared Peter, Emily accepts her father's help and the pair go to Munich, Savannah, and Atlanta.

Kristen Harmel elegantly creates mysteries within mysteries within mysteries. The ending took my breath away, and I cannot praise this book enough. If you love good, well written books, you will love "When We Meet Again." (I received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.)