Crystal Night is the sequel to Doppelgänger, a book which opens with the wedding of ace reporter, Rudy Styne, to Chessie Barnsworth, the love of his life who happens to be quite pregnant. At the wedding, Abe Maxwell, an elderly Jewish gentleman with a heavy German accent insists that their child obtain a bris, when Rudy does not even know that he may in fact be Jewish. During their honeymoon, Rudy and Chessie travel to Germany and that is where he runs into his look-alike, one Rolf Linzman, son of industrialist Gunter Linzman, owner of MB Airways, a successful offshoot of Lufthansa.
The back story, continues the tale of the Maxwells, a German Jewish family struggling to maintain their elite airline during WWI, through the air-war, flying with Hermann Göring and the Red Baron in the first novel and continuing their struggle through the rise of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust through WWII in Crystal Night. The modern story continues the saga of Rudy Styne, still on the trail of a master hacker threatening to take over the Internet. On a personal level, Rudy is also searching for his birth parents somehow linked to the Maxwells, and this mysterious Abe Maxwell, who in turn, is suing Gunter Linzman, the father of Rudy's doppelgänger to try and get back his long-lost airline, now a billion dollar off-shoot of Lufthansa.
The overall presentation of the trials that faced a Jewish-German family during the rise of Anti-Semitism... is stirring on how the triumph of faith and spirit, can overcome the suffering of a strong, resilient people during one of the darkest periods in modern history. .... You are a masterful storyteller. Edith Moraglia, New York City reader
I had to tell you how much I am enthralled with Crystal Night! You are an incredible chronicler your knowledge is vast! You have woven such minute detail into the tapestry or rather web of the novel. It lives for me, that is the [Germany] and times I remember.
I rush through supper to get comfortable on the sofa with The Book. I just can't put it down. Gloria McMurrough, Admissions Office, Roger Williams University.
