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Faith Lange, a senior research assistant and lecturer at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Manchester is busy getting comfortable in her new job. She's thrilled to be back in her home area, being able to see her beloved grandfather Marek, and to top it off she's working with her oldest and dearest friend Helen Kovacs. But Faith is under pressures. Her boss Antoni Yevanov is stern and demanding, she is Helen's supervisor and must push her to finish an important paper that's to be given at a major conference in Bonn, and a journalist who's known to write about war criminals wants to interview grandfather Marek for an article. When Helen doesn't show for her appointments with anyone at the university, Faith is feeling desperate. Soon the news comes out, Helen has been violently murdered while doing research in a private library -- research about the Russian and then Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe during the worst days of WWII. Since Helen wasn't supposed to be looking into the documents of that period in history, Faith knows that something very strange is going on. She's determined to find out who killed her friend. At the same time, journalist Jake Denbigh starts to uncover some as yet unknown history about war atrocities that happened at a place called Kurapaty in what is now known as Poland. Small items are discovered through formerly secret Soviet records and old photographs that link some of the elderly people he's interviewed, people he liked, to some horrors of World War Two. Soon he's also involved in finding out who killed Helen Kovacs, for her research seems to have the answer to the questions he has about what actually happened in the forest of Kurapaty. Well-written and powerful, THE FOREST OF SOULS by Carla Banks tells the story of the little-known hardships and mass murders that happened to the people in the Kurpaty area around Minsk during the Second World War. There are moments of blinding terror in this book as we follow the life of a young woman caught between the Russian army's brutality and the Nazis' mass killings in the Second World War. The story of the present day murder that includes an abusive husband and another too easy suspect is a weak framework for this powerful story of the murders of innocents by both sides of the war in Poland. That present day's mystery outcome is surprising but rather limp and not particularly needed, yet it does facilitate a way for the crucial secrets of the story to come to light. This is not light reading and not for the faint of heart, the facts of the mass murders in the Kurpaty Forest are true in this murder mystery and it will haunt you after reading it. I recommend this book to readers who like a well-written book and to anyone who has an interest in what happened during World War II.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, January 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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