...thunderstorms might well rampage across the skies, and there might be revolutions and riots in the streets, but folk still had to eat.
(Phineas Fox Mystery #5)
Decades after WWII, a scrapbook with references to Chopin's Library and music played at the execution of traitors -- both of which are so obscure that there are doubts about their ever having existed -- is found in rubble at Warsaw. The clues it holds leads to old secrets being uncovered, sometimes unknown to to those who were actually involved in events as they took place...
Weaving history into the imagined, this mystery tells of how two half-sisters who did not know of each other's existence were ultimately united by means of the scrapbook long after their mother had died believing that her first daughter had been killed in a fire which she herself had set along with the friend who later fathered her second daughter. The two of them had set the fire to wipe out evidence of having killed the woman's father at the Chopin Library: he had been a Nazi. As the fire blazed, her first daughter's father who had become accidentally trapped in the building put together the scrapbook which later led to the two girls learning of their history as old women.