Synopsis

This fictional novel is set in 1984 but goes back to events which took place in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1930s and 1940s, factual backgrounds are used as are historical places and persons. The title of the novel is taken from a beast in Norse mythology- Tanngnost' which is manifested in the form of a golden medallion.

The Story Line

Tallahassee, Florida State capital-1984

A State senator, Stephan Henke, faces re-election. In order to be one step ahead of his muck-raking opponents, he instigates enquiries to be made into his family background of which he has only the vaguest recollections

Senator Henke came to the U.S.A. from the Netherlands in 1944, at the age of 10, in the company of Joseph Visser, a close friend of his father but who was killed in an accident shortly after they arrived in the U S A.

The senator had last seen his father and, as was subsequently discovered, a Major in the Wehrmacht, at the time that he left the Netherlands. The Senator's mother died in 1937.

Stephan Henke instructs an expatriate Briton living in Tallahassee, Perry Crump, to go to Europe to find out what happened to the senator's father and any other remaining family. The starting point for Crump is a list of names and addresses taken from Joseph Visser's papers but are, at the time of the enquiries, 40 years old.

Crump's investigations take him to the Netherlands, to Sweden and then into West Germany where his enquiries come to a head in the village of Schandelah which was the site of a Nazi labour/concentration camp.

At Shandelah, Crump is faced with a question of identification which he resolves but part of his conclusion is wrong. The story continues.

The core of the story line is the surfacing of an intense love between two people, the immediate disruption that this causes and its tragic aftermath.

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