The Secret of the Grand Hôtel du Lac

Turn to the first page and your eyes land on the opening line: ‘The silence was eternal.’ Four deceptively subtle words—deceptive for the reason that a breath later, you are impaled on them, hooked on them until the final word of the last page of this novel—this THE SECRET OF THE GRAND HÔTEL DU LAC by Kathryn Gauci, this author who builds so intentionally on the premise of those four words page after page and never loses the thread, not one time, not even a little bit.
Gauci’s bailiwick is historical fiction often centered on heroes and heroines of World War I and World War II, as well as the interwar years, a Tussaud’s gallery of characters, so lifelike, so believable, so fleshed out that even nose to nose with them, you swear they are real. You end up asking yourself what devices this author uses to sculpt such three-dimensional characters out of a two-dimensional medium. The talent hails from a pool of some private source—a codified chamber of raw stuff ripe for shaping not responsive to just anyone. Only a few know the password, and Gauci is an honored, an awarded member of that select group.
Don’t let me make it sound a simple task, this chiseling, carving, molding, this blood, sweat, and tears of novel making. Pay close attention and you will get a notion of the enormous effort involved in it, the hours of research, the day upon day of pecking on a keyboard, the meals foregone, the companionship postponed until those final two words are spelled out: the THE END! The thing is though, that closing the last page of one of Gauci’s books leaves you wanting another one and another one.
THE SECRET OF THE GRAND HÔTEL DU LAC tells the story of Elizabeth Maxwell, code name Marie-Élise Lacroix, wartime spy for Britain operating in the months of the buildup of the World War II Allied invasion of Normandy. On a perilous mission to find and rescue missing comrades, one of whom is her husband, she is dropped by parachute in the thick of Nazi-Occupied France, a place overrun with Wehrmacht machines of war, patrolling German soldiers, the Gestapo, and the Milice Française, the Vichy regime’s armed and dangerous militia that held allegiance to Nazi Germany and fought against the French Resistance. The setting and backstory of the novel are thrilling and the suspense intense. I rate it a 5-star read and predict it will whet your appetite for Gauci’s entire body of work.
Gauci is a superb “passeur” (guide) through the mysteries of the Grand Hôtel du Lac and in resurrecting its “ghosts.” She tells us in the Postscript of her novel, “Like all stories, they fade over time. For me it was a powerful story and one that I could not let go. One thing is for sure, it was like walking through the countryside accompanied by ghosts, and I hope that in my own small way, I have brought the bravery of those ghosts alive again.” There are hints that she is brewing a new saga in her Melbourne, Australia studio of literary enchantments. Oh, goody, goody!© -From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist