Somewhere in Lorraine (Paperback)

Somewhere in Lorraine is an explosive fabulatory concoction of fiction. Set in 1954 Lorraine, it lay fused and ready to explode in a dangerous remote corner of Northeastern France. Everett Taylor, a troubled Korean War pilot, listens to his only friend, Dr. Hershey. His late father's old comrade recalls the disappearance of a regimental band under his father's command in "The Great War," where National Guard soldiers fought alongside their barbers, high-school bandsmen, brothers and more. In his farmhouse basement, Everett sifts through his father's things and finds, hidden at the bottom of a chest, twenty-six letters to the families of the band. Everett sails to France bent on discovering why his father failed to finish them. Living in Lorraine with a family acquaintance of Dr. Hershey, Everett opens their old wounds. As he unearths remnants of Western Front trenches, he falls in love with his nurse escort, Beatrice, whose mother, Everett learns, is a renowned French hypnotist his father once knew. Always suspicious of Dr. Hershey's motives for recommending France, Everett still stays. He learns more about his father who died when Everett was nine. One night in a deep dugout where Beatrice's father Sigmund has lived since 1918, selling unexploded munitions, Everett recalls his father's complications of gas warfare and coughing. He remembers when and where his father died - in Iowa and not somewhere in Lorraine.