Linda Frank

Lily and her significant other Simon travel to Rome to examine a previously unknown manuscript attributed to a famous Talmudic scholar. Lily spies a familiar painting in the shabby restaurant where the manuscript is unaccountably stored.

The suspicious death of the Vatican priest who led them there and the disappearance of both items send Lily and Simon to Lviv, Ukraine. Lily has been there once before, visiting relatives when the city was known as Lwów, Poland, before World War II and the Soviet occupation that isolated it behind the Iron Curtain. She wonders if any of the relatives she met then survived the Holocaust.

The trail of the manuscript and painting provides early clues. Ultimately, the quest reveals a modern woman’s saga of solitary resilience, despite the treachery of perpetrators professing to be holy, a tale that mirrors the centuries-old local legend of a Jewish heroine who saved a landmark synagogue.

Lily scoffs at the nickname Ruth, her Chinese-Jewish cousin living in Israel, gives her while presenting an unlikely new quest: to find a historic Iraqi Torah scroll that has gone missing from the home of Ruth’s uncle, a retired Chinese government official in Shanghai. The Torah’s disappearance portends serious personal and diplomatic consequences. Although Lily can’t imagine finding a Torah in China, she and her significant other, Simon, agree they must assist Ruth.

It’s 1991, and Saddam Hussein’s Scuds raining down on Israel cast an ironic pall on the mission, along with threats, physical attack, and murder. The cultural exoticism and strangeness of the Chinese setting add to Lily’s skepticism and sense of futility. Twenty-five hundred years of Jewish Diaspora underlie The Lost Torah of Shanghai, as Lily uncovers personal and political history that restores her spirit and self-confidence as a journalist-turned-accidental-sleuth.

Growing up in Milwaukee and as a longtime working mother, I never dreamed that, as “a woman of a certain age,” I’d be privileged to enjoy a fulfilling volunteer life, global travel, and the opportunity to indulge my passion for history by writing novels.

Some people see me in my protagonist, Lily: I’ve worked as a journalist, I swim, I send home-baked goodies to far-flung kids. But she’s only aged five years between After the Auction and The Nice Little Blonde Girl. It’s been nine. I’d like her secret. (For more about Linda, click here).