Marcus Glenwood, the attorney who took on the nasty multinational New Horizons in The Great Divide (2000), accepts a case from the company's new CEO, Dale Steadman. It seems that Steadman's ex-wife, a young opera diva named Erin Brandt, has kidnapped their infant daughter, Celeste, and taken her to Germany. The question is why, since Erin is cold to the touch, regarded her husband as a country bumpkin, and never showed any love for Celeste. Germany, as Bunn is at pains to show, resists court attempts to win back even abducted children, because of the chauvinistic notion that anything German is by definition more peaceful and wholesome, particularly if the alternative is the violent U.S. Threading his way through the complications of international law, Marcus dispatches his assistant--and girlfriend--Kirsten to Europe to slap a subpoena on Erin. Erin, always the temptress, confronts Kirsten with her old life in the fast lane, a life not dissimilar to Erin's, and of which Marcus knows nothing. Meanwhile, back in the States, another plotline develops at Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera. Bunn convincingly portrays the world of opera from the Met to Dusseldorf, and though he is not a lawyer, he has a gift for courtroom dialogue. This is a novel about mature romantic love, and how we behave when we cannot find it. It is a thoughtful, moral story, although Bunn's many evangelical readers will find little in it that is overtly Christian.
