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Told entirely in letters, this short novel follows two German friends and business partners, Max Eisenstein, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin Schulse, who returns to Germany in 1932. Their warm early correspondence slowly changes when Hitler's rise leaves Martin more interested in the party and less in his friend. Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, writing in 1938, shows how a friendship breaks apart under pressure from ideology, and Max answers in a way that is cold and calculated. The epistolary format keeps the story tight and the ending hard.

It takes under an hour to read and is often assigned in schools to open discussions about complicity and betrayal. Anyone who wants a quick look at how ordinary people were drawn into Nazism, written by an American in real time, should pick it up.

Thought-provoking; an easy read.

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