Find Me Again

Books in Canada

Despite Find Me Again’s cover notes I was unprepared for the engrossing journey over two centuries on which I was to accompany the author. This is Warsh’s second novel, a sequel to the well regarded To Die in Spring, and once again its central character is Dr. Rebecca Temple.  

Rebecca’s husband has been dead eleven months, too short a time for her to reconcile herself to this tragedy and the opening chapters are suitably poignant and melancholy. Her relationship with Sarah, her Mother-in-Law, is somehow stilted and mostly at arms length emotionally. Sarah has justification for her reluctance to commit to a warmer relationship; her experience as a Holocaust survivor in occupied Poland makes her a victim of dark and distressing nightmares. The horrors of the Holocaust are a necessary and integral ingredient of this tale and this aspect is handled with great sensitivity by Warsh.

We are diverted from Rebecca’s sadness with the arrival of Halina, an old friend of Sarah’s, who has come from Communist Poland to Toronto in the hope of finding a cure for her daughter Natalka’s serious illness. Through these visitors we are introduced to Count Michael Oginski, a larger than life charmer, described with affection by Warsh and John Baron, another Polish émigré, who is the martinet owner of the mining company that the Count now works for in Toronto. The Count tells Rebecca with great enthusiasm of the historical novel that he is writing, which, he claims, will revise current understanding of history and confirm his royal ancestry.   A surprising development soon follows: There is a murder and we are introduced to two mysteries-one set in the late 1970s, the other in the mid 1740s. While Rebecca strives to identify a murderer in Toronto, believing that the Count’s manuscript contains the answer, Warsh transports us through history. We become witnesses to the often-incestuous affairs and political intrigues of the royal courts of Poland, Russia, Saxony and Prussia.

Rebecca, while searching for answers in the Count’s novel, becomes transfixed by the characters and their machinations; there’s plenty of romance, political diplomacy, and at times, plain jostling for better status at court. 

Warsh knits the two mysteries together seamlessly, writing convincingly of Europe in the 1740s, ably capturing the nuances of the language of those times. She handles the transition from one story to the other deftly until Dr. Temple, through her sheer determination and courage, presents us with satisfying and believable solutions to both conundrums. 

The author, while raised in Toronto, was born in Germany, a child of Holocaust survivors, and has an obvious empathy for those who lived through those events; she has successfully put that understanding to use in this excellent novel.

Desmond McNally (Books in Canada)

To Die In Spring

After the recent death of her artist husband, it's not all raisins and almonds in the relocated and refurbished consulting room of Dr. Rebecca Temple in downtown Toronto. There was nothing in Rebecca's past to prepare her for the headlong lethal drama that walked innocently into her waiting room in the guise of harmless old Goldie Kochinsky. From Goldie, Dr. Temple learned, to her pain, that even paranoids have enemies. With the unrelenting pace of a jack-hammer, the suspense and horror combine to keep the pressure on full, while Argentine heavies and a relentless murderer stop at nothing in their attempts to keep the lid on a whole Pandora's box of secrets going back to the death camps of Poland in the Second World War. This is the sort of novel that sells the sequel as you turn the pages of the present most accomplished introduction.

Howard Engel
Author of the "Benny Cooperman" mysteries

"...To Die in Spring is Torontonian Sylvia Warsh's first published mystery and it's a good deal better than the work of many veterans. It's also set up as a kickoff to a promising series featuring Dr. Rebecca Temple, a young widow recovering from the early death of her beloved artist husband.
...The novel is set in 1979, which puts it in temporal reach of the Second World War as well as the horrors of Argentina, where many Nazis and some surviving Jews fled after the war. Warsh handles fairly deftly the now-historical issues, putting them into the terms and mouths of characters who display the full range of greed and obsession required to play out her plot.
...Warsh, who teaches creative writing to seniors in Toronto, does a fine job of unwrapping mysterious identities until both sins and crimes lie satisfactorily revealed."

Joan Barfoot
The London Free Press, August 19, 2000

"...Warsh writes sensitively about the persecution of the Jews, and she shows convincingly how the actions of the past are not discrete-they have monumental effects on the present and future. And Warsh is even-handed in her treatment of human nature by making villains whose evil is not based in religion, but in greed.
...Somehow Warsh manages to pull off the combination of oppressed and oppressors, while adding in losses of love and life. In tying the threads of the mystery together, in the conclusion Warsh gives her characters and her readers hope that the positive side of human beings will prevail."

Candice Fertile
The Edmonton Journal, September. 10, 2000

"It's cause for celebration when another Canadian mystery writer has confidence enough to set a novel in a Canadian city instead of somewhere real or fictional in the USA. Especially when the latest American trend has been to use Britain as a setting and a nobleman, a la Peter Wimsey, as detective. When novels like Sylvia Maultash Warsh's To Die in Spring appear, I am delighted to be on my home turf in a believable world."

Susan Evans Shaw
701.com, June 14, 2000