Publisher's Synopsis
Rob and Hannah Wilson (twins, 30) return to Oregon from Europe in 2020 for their father's funeral. Dan Wilson, 70, rests in a green cemetery of twittering birds and sun-dappled shade, beside his second wife (or was she?) Nancy, who died in 2018 after 30 happy years together. Among two dozen mourners stands unnoticed a beautiful, stylish angel named Claire from a parallel reality, wearing designer sunglasses and a Parisian outfit-the ghost of the twins' baby sister Klara, who died as an infant in 1979 as Dan Wilson served as a young soldier in Heidelberg, West Germany.Ghostly Claire looks classy and cool behind designer sunglasses, with a faint glow behind her, and untouched by raindrops. Moving unseen through this story, Claire plants Dan's journals and drops other clues to send Rob and Hannah on a mission: tying together loose ends and dead people in three parallel worlds. Claire's gift to this world will be to reveal the secret of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, the world's most treasured and controversial art work.Hannah works for a Paris insurance firm, and is dating young music producer Yves Cartier. Rob is a doctoral student at Frankfurt's Goethe University, dating Elise Gillen of Luxembourg. Young Dan Wilson made a tragic decision on a famous bridge (Pont des Arts) one day in 1978. He said goodbye to the love of his life (Paris grad student Claudette Vervain), returned to his duty station in Heidelberg, and married a Croatian-German girl named Stana Chetko based on Stana's lies about (not) being pregnant by Dan.Their daughter Klara (Claire) was conceived soon after. In that dark, forbidding mountain village near Heidelberg, Dan Wilson's emotional nightmare included a loveless marriage; baby Klara's death at six months from a heart defect; sociopathic bullying by Stana's father (an escaped Croatian Nazi war criminal); and Dan's unsympathetic, sometimes cruel U.S. Army superiors.In Paris, Claudette's doctoral thesis held stunning revelations on Leonardo da Vinci's art works in the Louvre, from notebooks of Dr. Benjamin Wandrous, a Jewish scholar murdered by the Nazis in occupied 1940s France. Soon after Dan left her, heart-broken Claudette dated a young alcoholic. Claudette died in a car crash, and her wonderful discoveries were lost.Fate, however, works with angels sometimes to fix unbearable situations. On the windy, weepy, rainy 1979 night as Klara died at the German medical center in Heidelberg, a marvel happened in the village miles away as her broken-hearted father slept exhaustedly. He awoke in darkness, sat on the bed, and heard a calm, strong woman's voice in his head. He instantly knew it was his baby daughter, but as a mature woman (somehow, somewhere). Klara (Claire) assured him everything would be fine (though he'd grieve for the rest of his life); she promised that at the moment of his death, he'd be given a wonderful gift. He would return as a young man to that bridge, the Pont des Arts near the Louvre. Instead of leaving, he would hold Claudette tightly, and never let her go. The world would learn the true secret of Leonardo's obsession with the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, a rather ordinary housewife in 1500s Florence. Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo's portrait hangs in the Louvre, insured at a record billion Euros. Touched by tragedy and joys forever codified in her eyes and enigmatic smile, Mona Lisa gazes at us from a lost world with a melancholy but courageous visage, a woman who lived a full, hard life centuries ago. Leonardo's obsession as a Renaissance artist and scientist went far beyond her humanity to a spiritual plane. Had anyone known, he'd have been burned as a heretic or witch in a clueless world. In the famous Shakespeare & Company bookstore on the Left Bank, on her journey, Hannah bumps into her lost sister's ghost for the first time under a sign that reads: "Be not unkind to strangers, lest they turn out to be angels."
